Summer's Over, Time To Strike

Summer is coming to an end and so the time draws near for parents in Mallorca to pack away the kids' lilos, to fork out for new textbooks (various languages) and to arrange for the pre-school visit to the hairdresser. Back to school. Vuelta al cole, as they say. And back to the same old playground posturing. The "Great Conflict" has never been quite forgotten during the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. It has been smouldering like a discarded fag end of discredited policies and attitudes in the tangled undergrowth of TIL and pro- and anti-Catalanism ready to burst into the flames of a September on educational fire. Canadairs of common sense are needed to douse the conflagration, but common sense has been de-commissioned. Where is the ice bucket of negotiation and dialogue to challenge and cool the tempers? Being shoved into the attic along with the lilo.

President Bauzá wasn't actually wrong when he said the other day that if you were concerned about children, there wouldn't be a strike. Ah yes, the children. The forgotten stakeholders in the "Great Conflict". Curious that. But then maybe not. Just as tourists are the lowest priority for tourism policy, so the raw human material of education, the kids, are bottom of the education-argument class. Bauzá's "you" were the Assemblea de Docents, the self-styled teachers' assembly that aspires to be a teaching union (by the name of Alternativa) and seemingly sweep all before it in declaring some sort of Catalanist caliphate of pedagogic fundamentalism. I don't believe for one moment that all its members would prefer Mallorca to rise up and form part of an independent Catalan Lands, but some of its members most certainly do. Never ever let it be said that the "Great Conflict" has not been about politics.

The Assemblea has sought dialogue, but not actually being a union - yet - the government does not consider it to be a body with which it should be having dialogue, even if it wanted to, though it does of course insist that the staff room door is always open for a chat. PSOE has told the government that it considers the Assemblea to be a "valid interlocutor", as it also considers the parents' associations, the university and various other associations to be valid interlocutors. Perhaps, therefore, they should all gather in a grand educational locutorio and talk to each other from the safety of the phone booths without ever daring to go face to face.

But then, what do they want dialogue about? Despite Bauzá having been attacked from all sides including his own for the government's educational policy, he remains stubbornly less than humble, having declared after the disastrous Euro elections that there would be PP humility. Not so, unless humility is a synonym for authoritarianism, of which he is accused; and no, it is not a synonym.

So, the Assemblea will have its day off at the start of the school year (15 September), and all the well-rehearsed arguments will spin once more on the roundabout in the playground, the newest of them to do with the insistence of the education ministry that all schools have to have a programme of TIL in place for the new school year. Ah well, never mind, come next June, Podemos, PSOE and others on the left will have managed to cobble together a coalition, and TIL and anti-Catalanism will be removed and placed in the school storeroom of educational obsolescence along with the abacus.


Index for August 2014

Balearics oil prospecting - 10 August 2014
Batucada - 2 August 2014
Bellevue, Marsans and Orizonia - 26 August 2014
Bullrings of Mallorca - 21 August 2014
Campaign against bad behaviour (Magalluf) - 17 August 2014
Can Picafort ducks - 9 August 2014
Cossiers folk dance - 25 August 2014
Education conflict - 31 August 2014
Emperor Augustus' bust - 13 August 2014
Festival of Lanterns, Alcúdia - 23 August 2014
First World War and Mallorca - 4 August 2014, 5 August 2014, 6 August 2014, 7 August 2014
Glamping - 20 August 2014
Guillem Bestard - 19 August 2014
Holiday lets - 8 August 2014, 12 August 2014
Joan Mascaró i Fornés - 30 August 2014
Magalluf mole - 22 August 2014
Matas in prison - 3 August 2014
Mini tourist trains - 14 August 2014
Rock 'n' Rostoll and fiesta raves - 28 August 2014
Son Espases corruption case - 24 August 2014
Statutes of autonomy and responsibilities - 18 August 2014
Tour guides - 11 August 2014
Tourism law - 15 August 2014
Tourism spend statistics - 29 August 2014
Tourist days and weeks - 27 August 2014
Tourist satisfaction decline - 1 August 2014
Trofeo Almirante Conde de Barcelona regatta - 16 August 2014