Politics and priorities

My friend Prospero, over at JimenaPulse, was boiling with indignation when we met for coffee the other day. He’s one of those people that get involved, very involved, in any bombardeo that’s going. He’d just come from a second day of demonstrations at the schools in his village, where he’s lived for almost twenty years and where his son goes to class. To make it short, he and his fellow parents had been demonstrating against the lack of a special education teacher for a couple of kids there. If you’ve been following the story on his informative site, you’ll understand.

“I don’t get it, I really don’t,” he said. “The head teacher at the senior school just told me that she’d been notified that she was to accommodate a teacher for immigrant children, so they don’t lose their home culture!” He felt, I think rightly, that that sort of thing should be encouraged at home, rather than at school. “But then they say that those handicapped children can’t have the attention they need so much and are entitled to by law!” he spat out, at risk of spraying coffee all over the bar. I have nothing against immigrants for I am one myself, but what little British culture I have left I acquired at home. But then, ‘immigration’ was not the latest buzz-word in my youth. ‘Immigrant’, indeed, was an insult.
Ah, politics, I thought. Photo opportunities, I said. It looks good on the telly, I reasoned.

It’s not exclusive to Spain, of course, but there seems to be knack here for what I call ‘the disease of the week’. Here today, gone tomorrow, as soon as its off the headlines. As a journalist I understand it, but I don’t accept it gracefully. I accept, because I have to, that our attention span has shortened a great deal since the advent of television and that we’re too busy to read articulate columns about any one thing unless it affects us directly. But what I have trouble accepting are the contradictions illustrated by Prospero’s indignation.

That the Socialist governments of Spain and Andalucía, with their innumerable técnicos sitting in splendid isolation from the daily grind of the people their political cronies … sorry, bosses … supposedly represent, should come up with the farcical idea of a special teacher ‘to encourage the home culture’ of our many immigrants, when there is need, desperate need, for someone to help those other children with politically incorrect handicaps to take part in the basic, essential right that is education – well, it’s beyond my understanding, too. As I write, I am getting as indignant as Prospero. And I have nothing against Socialists for I am one myself.

Then I check some more sites, mostly Spanish, to find several of them reporting the arrival of a specially equipped bus that goes around the smaller towns and villages of Andalucia with ‘information’. No, nothing to do with education, immigration or schools; this bus, which must have cost a fortune to equip with lots of computers, websites that are confusng in their numbers, sides that slide out to make a conference room, and two full-time employees plus driver and co-pilot, is out to convince local business people to market their products and services under a brand name called ‘Parque Natural de Andalucía’. Another brand name and more expenses -it isn’t free- for small businesses that are already feeling the pinch of recession. All well and good: marketing is essential to today’s business environment and should be encouraged.

But a decent, dignified education is much more essential, surely.

If Spain is close to the bottom of the class in terms of education in Europe, Andalucía is at the very bottom of even that comparative list, according to the Informe Prisa on education. So where are the priorities? The cost of that lime green bus, which sports the Junta de Andalucía’s logo so proudly all over it, would probably cover the salaries of at least four special education teachers for a year. And it all comes out of the same kitty: our taxes.

I forgot: children don’t vote.
(c) Alexander Bewick 2008