The Minister of Education, José Antonio Rovira, has assured that the mobilization called by the educational unions for this coming Thursday, May 23, is a “political strike” and rejects that the choice of the date is “casual”, since it is on the eve of the start of the European election campaign: “I stopped believing in coincidences years ago,” he noted.
In these terms, he spoke this Tuesday in statements to the media after the presentation of the Student Admission Campaign for the 2024-2025 academic year, where he insisted that the Valencian government is complying with its electoral program although “certain associations and unions do not agree.”
In this sense, the head of Education of the Consell has indicated that in the meeting he held this Monday with the representatives of Plataforma per l’Ensenyament – the organizer of the strike – it was “clearly” seen that they had “very distant” positions. .
“Their approach to withdrawing the strike is that everything returns to the policies of the Botànic government: maintenance of the Multilingualism Law, not freedom of choice of language or centers, that is, everything contrary to what our electoral program, with which we presented ourselves to the elections, he said,” said the minister while pointing out that, from “the government of change”, what is being done is “applying the electoral program” endorsed by the “majority” of the Valencians.
In this regard, Rovira has pointed out that Valencians do want freedom of choice of center and freedom within a compensation model of choice of base language because “that’s how they voted.” “Logically, we are not going to withdraw these proposals to stop a strike,” she stated.
Regarding the date of the strike call, the minister has stated that it is “a bit of a coincidence” to him that it is scheduled for the day before the European election campaign begins and has indicated that “I stopped believing in coincidences years ago.” ”.
“I think it is clearly a political strike and, logically, we are not going to withdraw all the projects we have underway. There are others: the return to numerical grades, replacing hours of interdisciplinary programs with more mathematics or more English,” she stressed.
Along these lines, he has indicated that one of the issues he conveyed to the unions was that he considered that education is “much more” than language: “Language is very important. Until now, what the taxation policies have come to demonstrate is that the use of the language is being lost little by little and we are going to change the axis and, instead of taxation policies, they are going to be promotion policies,” he highlighted. he.
Thus, José Antonio Rovira has announced that the Department of Education will promote Valencian in Spanish-speaking areas in order to prevent them from requesting the exemption of the language. “Since they are going to class, let them take exams because they are going to have prizes in the form of qualifications,” he stated.
In this sense, the councilor has clarified that “they are not going to give away Valencian qualifications” but rather that a project is going to be applied, which, as he has pointed out, “they copied” the previous Botanic government, to give qualifications based on the grades and to the educational stages.
“They are awards in the sense that the effort of getting a grade rewards you with a C1. This is not a title tombola, but simply the effort to finish an educational stage will give you some qualifications,” he explained while clarifying that this initiative will be applied throughout the Valencian Community.
“We are going to move from a policy of imposition to promotion. Let’s see if we can avoid this decline in the use of Valencian among young people,” he highlighted.
Questioned by the criticism of some educational unions who saw the minimum services for the day of the strike as “abusive”, the Minister of Education clarified that the minimum services planned are the same as those of the last strikes and has pointed to a “bad interpretation” by the unions.
Likewise, he has asked that, in the face of the strike, the “data war” not be entered into and that the information provided by the unions on the follow-up of the strike be documented since he assures that the information from the department will be available. documented.
