The day has emerged as usual in the new normality at the Ibaeta campus of the UPV/EHU: few students and half-empty cafeterias, nothing to do with previous courses. However, three units of the mobile brigade of the Ertzaintza are standing next to the university and do not seem to have approached coffee. By 8 a.m., dozens of students have begun to meet under the classroom. These are not going to class, because some are not students of the same. They are members of the organization Ikasle Abertzaleak, willing to make a contribution from the university to the educational strike.

With the leaflets available, they have been organized by Faculties for the realization of the information pickets. There has not been much work on the portals of the buildings, as nine in the morning there are few students going through the campus. A number of students who have come to class have received the leaflets with surprise explaining the reasons for the strike. Many have ignored it, but they have also asked about the starting point of the demonstration.

The AI has extended three specific requirements for this call. First, “ensure access to education of working-class students”. Secondly, “the academic difficulties generated by the telematic learning modality do not impede the learning process”. Finally, they have claimed "the right to do political and militant work, guaranteeing the right to freedom of expression". When asked about the meaning of this third demand, they have set an example of the call for a strike: “Management teams in many schools have used the excuse of an irregular course to prevent ESO and Baccalaureate students from joining the strike, as most schools have not voted.”

Hundreds of students

In the absence of high school pupils, young people from all corners of Gipuzkoa have approached to show their support for these demands until hundreds of people have gathered for the beginning of the demonstration. According to the organizers, more than 800 schoolchildren have met in Ibaeta from 11:30 a.m. Security officials have immediately begun by public address to explain the anti-COVID-19 criteria, and the students have prepared first hand three long columns, respecting the distances of two meters between them.

Education with personnel control

Once all health measures have been implemented, the march has begun well, following the banner “Do not pay the consequences to the working class!”. The Ertzaintza has been persecuted at all times, but this has not frightened young people, and on more than one occasion they have called out for “working-class control over education”. When the demonstration has passed by the schools, those who have not been able to join the strike have been stared out of the windows and the patio. The inhabitants of the patio rushed to the entrance of the school, stirred by the screams, the firecrackers and the multitude.

Closure

Thus, without further incident, the demonstration has returned to Ibaeta. In it, the students have been divided into five lines to listen to the final communiqué. Once this is done, two AI militants have read a statement from a lectern. The last words said: “At a time when the educational problem lies between private and public education, we say it clearly: the issue is in education subordinated to capital or in education controlled by workers”. Moreover, the AI Corps has reaffirmed itself in the defense of the latter, in Donostia-San Sebastián and in the other Basque capitals.