Anti-fascist education beyond 23J | Education

Education is either anti-fascist or it’s not education. But not only in view of the elections of July 23, where Spain is at stake to save neoliberal fascism from infamous memory or advance in democracy and equality, but beyond 23J, in front of the future of so many young people who will build the society of Tomorrow .

Educating in diversity, equality, inclusion, democracy, social justice and human rights is educating in anti-fascism. There is no neutrality possible. Educating for anti-fascism is educating for diversity, equality, inclusion, social justice and human rights. Without concessions or half measures.

Because to be democratic you have to be anti-fascist. It is a basic principle that until recently was a cornerstone of the construction of Europe today, after the fascist barbarism of the 1930s and the genocide that resulted from it. While other European democracies were based on the anti-fascism paradigm, the Spanish one did so on the “overcoming” of the past, the oblivion of Franco’s fascism which survived in the institutions and which has now spread like a plague in society and which permeates our young people.

Since July 24, we have two urgent and essential tasks as a society. The first is to ask how it was possible that the incitement to hatred and the glorification of barbarism that the extreme right and the extreme right have spread throughout Europe and that has managed to make so many young people in Spain believe that this is another political option that can be defended and voted on. Secondly, we must decide how to guide our country’s education system to once again eradicate this scourge, as philosopher Albert Camus would say, this political malady with its epicenter marked by hatred corroding a vulnerable and fragile democracy. in his novel Plague he recalled that this plague “neither dies nor disappears forever; it can lie dormant for years, until it reappears again.

The question we must ask ourselves is what have we done in education in the last 20 years so that so many young people declare themselves voters or sympathizers of fascism. Maybe we’ve been too busy training teachers in gamification strategies, awareness, bilingualism and digital skills, or absorbed in how to teach how to solve square roots and quadratic equations, or how to do syntax analysis, develop art without critical engagement or history without memory. While we watched impassively, looking the other way, as they privatize our education, maintain National-Catholic indoctrination with religion, or cut funding for public education, allocating education budgets to boost military spending, which doubled the increase in education in 2022 .

As the father of British conservative liberalism, Edmund Burke, recalls: for evil to triumph, it is only necessary that good people do nothing

As Martin Luther King said “we shall repent in this generation not only for the hateful words and deeds of bad people, but for the appalling silence of good people,” who look the other way at the rise of fascism. As the father of British conservative liberalism, Edmund Burke, recalls: for evil to triumph, it is only necessary that good people do nothing.

José Luis Martín Descalzo, in his work A factory of highly educated monsters, explained how a former Dachau concentration camp prisoner, a teacher, commented that those gas chambers were built by skilled engineers, that lethal injections were given by doctors or registered nurses, that newborns were suffocated by assistants highly competent medical professionals, that women and children had been shot by educated people, by doctors and university graduates. And he concluded: since I noticed it, I am suspicious of the education we are giving.

There is no useful knowledge if it doesn’t make us better people and a better, fairer and more caring society with those we live with and with the planet we inhabit. We cannot continue to be “indifferent” or “obedient” to a social, economic, ideological, political and educational model which justifies and leads to inequality, lack of solidarity and brutal selfishness, to plunder the common good, to ecocide of the planet, machismo, hatred, intolerance and fascism. The real ammo in this model isn’t just rubber bullets or tear gas; it is our silence and our accomplice indifference.

The educational community cannot remain ignorant or indifferent to barbarism. We have to put ourselves on the line to the point of staining ourselves, as the poet would say, in facing this political disease which corrodes a vulnerable and fragile democracy and which, despite knowing that it can never be completely eradicated without overcoming the capitalist system, as the philosopher claimed Walter Benjamin or the playwright Bertolt Brecht, we must, meanwhile, constantly and tenaciously contain. And the most powerful antidote to the barbarism of this neo-fascism that is advancing like a virus through Europe and Spain is education. An education for the common good against hatred, racism, intolerance and harassment of democracy.

It is urgent and crucial to agree on a social pact for an educational system starting from an anti-fascist pedagogy

Lucio Anneo Seneca, in the fourth century before our era, stated: “we don’t dare to do many things because we assure them that they are difficult, but they are difficult because we don’t dare to do them”. We must dare to dream. We risk the future of our sons and daughters and that of society as a whole.

In short, it is urgent and crucial to agree on a social pact for an educational system starting from an anti-fascist pedagogy, since education must be consistent with the model of society that we intend to build, i.e. more just, equitable, supportive, ecological, feminist, inclusive and happy. Joining efforts and sharing alternative proposals and initiatives to the policies of neo-fascism, which represent the most serious attack on public education since the transition, bringing us back to the Francoist and nineteenth-century model of school and society. It is essential to continue taking decisive steps towards an educational model that contributes to the construction of a wise, critical and aware citizenry, which contributes to making the world more just and better, leaving no one behind, as well as the education of more equal people. , freer, more critical, more ecofeminist and more creative.

For this, I insist once again, as an educational community, we must engage beyond 23J to educate the new generations in equality, inclusion, social justice, the common good and human rights from a clearly anti-fascist point of view. Without concessions or half measures. You can’t be a democrat without being an anti-fascist.

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