The Abnormality Of Mallorca's Education

You'll no doubt remember the teachers' strike. Especially those of you with school-age children attending state schools in the Balearics. It seems like an age ago that it took place. During an age that has now passed, that of the Bauzá administration and its full-frontal conflict with the teachers, one that was primarily to do with the implementation of trilingual teaching (TIL), a system that no longer exists, the new government having consigned it to the history textbooks with the board rubber of a decree.

The 2013-2014 school year did not start with normality. School years normally do begin with normality. Press reports say so. Each year it is the same. But it wasn't normal in September 2013. The teachers were on strike and remained on strike until October. In the midst of the strike the largest demonstration witnessed in the Balearics took place. A hundred thousand in Palma protesting against Bauzá, against TIL and in defence of Catalan instruction. Though the teachers went back to the classrooms after three weeks, the strike wasn't officially called off. It was indefinite. Remarkably enough, given that there is a new government whose first act was to kill off TIL, the strike is still indefinite.

The education minister, Martí March, cannot understand why the strike hasn't been called off. There is no justification, in his view, for it remaining indefinite, meaning it could be reactivated at any time. What more do the teachers want, now that the devil's work of TIL has been undone? He anticipates the school year starting with normality, but behind the appearance of normality lurks the abnormal.

March is a professorial type, similar to Bauzá's first education minister Rafael Bosch, who was to be a victim of TIL dogmatism in that he wasn't antagonistic towards Catalan to the extent that his boss was. Professorial types might be said to be one step removed from the hurl and the burl and the cuts to the throat of down and dirty politics. They apply proportion and so hope that others will too. But in Mallorca's world of education, there are instead alternative dogmas that compete and are clouded by degrees of impetuousness and emotiveness, to which can be added the need for a "cause".

While the unions are there, fighting the good fight, there is also the unmistakable presence of the Assemblea de Docents, the teachers' assembly, with its green tide of green t-shirts. This was a product of TIL. The assembly's defence of education against Bauzá was firmly based on the defence of Catalan. English was only ever a side issue.

With TIL abandoned, March cannot understand the need for the strike to be maintained. Nor can many others. But he must surely understand that the teachers' assembly, now deprived of the prime reason for it having come into existence, has become a self-perpetuating force in search of other causes. It has become a power in the land, bolstered, it would think, by the belief that the rebellion against TIL, with it at the head of it, was what brought Bauzá down. It shows no sign of wishing to relinquish this power.

The green tide manifested itself before parliament on Wednesday. Podemos issued a declaration against the national education law - LOMCE. It was one of almost Marxist rhetoric that wouldn't have been out of place in the febrile environment of a students' union meeting debating the application of the dialectic to whatever issue happens to be flavour of the month. As such, it was embarrassing. LOMCE may be a lousy law, not least because of its weird insistence on religious education which most Catholics believe to be unnecessary and unwarranted, but it cannot just be ignored. National laws cannot simply be disobeyed.

This, though, is what the assembly wants, as it also wants Bauzá cutbacks to be reversed, and as it further wants a revision of the obscure "decreto de minimos", something which determines quotas of Catalan (and Castellano). March is dragging his heels on all of these is the conclusion that is being made. Hence the strike will not be called off.

But within all of this is the shaky nature of the government. The Podemos declaration was an implication that PSOE, in charge of education, is as anti-democratic and all the rest as the Partido Popular, whose law LOMCE is. The teachers have found easy allies among the ranks of Podemos (and Més to an extent as well). Alberto Jarabo, the Podemos leader, was one of those wearing the green t-shirt.

March, a moderate in a similar way that Bosch was, finds himself in the cross-fire of the government's tensions and of the extremes of Mallorca's educational politics. Just, in truth, as Bosch was also trapped.

The strike will not be called off. Normality has yet to return. When will it?