Students protest education reforms

Associations representing students have called for a mixed protest this week, combining mobilisations, confinements, and information pickets in several Spanish universities as a criticism of the educational reform, the model of practices or the “repression mechanisms”.

In Valencia, a special “running of the bulls” event has been organised for today, Wednesday, outside the Faculty of History of the University of Valencia.

Last month, the student unions opened a phase of assemblies in study centres throughout Spain, with the aim of “generating temporary spaces for organisation and deliberation that would decide on the new steps of the student movement.” From this process was born the call for a day of “state struggle” for this Thursday, April 27.

“We take the lessons from the student general strike of March 24, 2022 in our hands, we collect what has been sown in recent months and we structure forces around a unitary date,” the student organisations say in a statement.

The unions warn that the general demands that move the day of struggle on April 27 “are already widely rooted in the centres and are known – but not attended to – by the central government.”

Specifically, they demand the paralysis of educational laws and the opening of “a process of real participation of the educational community, its structures and its assemblies in decision-making”; the repeal of the “regulations that repress student and popular action”; or the labourisation of curricular and extracurricular practices with salary equality and rights, applying these same premises to the already recognised labour practices.

They also demand an increase in scholarships “with an eye toward fully free education”; expel private companies from education, betting on a “totally public, quality and equal education, with more resources, more personnel, better conditions and true accompaniment to the integral and human development of the student”; staffing and resourcing public health and educational centres to address, among other things, mental health; and access to housing, energy and other goods “as rights of the working people and not merchandise.”

“We don’t want to choose between studying or supporting ourselves! No to the imperialist war! The student body and the people have nothing to gain in other people’s wars, under other people’s interests,” the student organisations declare.

The campaign began yesterday at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid; moving to the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Autonomous University of Madrid, at the Faculty of History of the Complutense University of Madrid, at the Faculty of History of the University of Valencia, at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Granada and in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Córdoba today; and on April 27 at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Cádiz.

In addition, on April 27 they have called rallies and actions in Alicante, Burgos, Córdoba, Granada, Salamanca, Santander, Vizcaya and Zaragoza.

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