Our students have long had a red agenda on June 6th, 7th and 8th. All the year of the second year of high school, we have been condemned to wait for these days. Given the stress and nervousness that this entails, it has become a course that is of no use to us.

Sitting individually, we are forced to pass the test individually, promoting and normalizing the competitiveness between us.Let’s see who gets the highest score, let’s see who is the “fastest”. As a reward, you’ll have limited access to college degrees that are becoming more and more expensive.Instead of learning what we want, the logic is “learning what touches”. We are doomed to learn according to the results of a study.

Let us lift our heads from the pages of study and look further. The pressures, the efforts, the jokes, the pleas and the threats to steer our lives and the project of life have long been nailed in our lives. Families, media, public institutions and/or companies suggest what we should learn. Sometimes through recommendations poisoned with sweet words, sometimes with the cold firmness of authority.

In fact, the current education is designed in the coordinates of the patriarchal capitalist system. They want to condemn us to be the skilled workforce that capital needs. They want to transform us into an individualistic, atomized and docile individual who will not question the status quo.

The complete hegemony of capitalism has led us to believe that there is no alternative. On the fraud of what a human capitalism is possible, the most brutal capitalism is rooted.

The bet on neoliberalism has been accompanied by the conservative, Jacobin and Spanish policies of the reactionary Spanish and French states. From this combination, not only the university plans EU2020 and Bologna have been born, but also educational reforms such as LOMCE in the Southern Basque Country.

The reforms have sought to limit the Basque Country’s ability to build its own educational model tailored to its needs for an emancipatory project. For the sake of teaching the Spanish and French national sentiment and the commercialization of education, of course.

The damned LOMCE law is a precursor to the adjustment of the educational path. It promotes competitiveness among students, as well as between schools. Students impose on us revaluations (exams that are imposed on us to advance gradually) that we know very well, in order to guide us towards a more specialized training trajectory. We find ourselves facing a reform with a profound ideological burden that favors Spanish colonization, mercantilization and machismo.

In Vocational Training we understand in this line the commitment to dual education in particular. Adapting to the needs of the market, it has become a means of producing a specialized workforce. It coincides, by the way, with the extremely precarious recruitment of young people thanks to the labour reforms of recent years.

At the same time, the imposition of the Bologna and EU2020 plans has led to the closing of the doors of the universities and a process of elitisation to adapt them to the needs of the free market. Rate increases, face-to-face and compulsory classes (which is incompatible with a job), loss of grade values and “masteritis”... are just a few examples.

The economic and political elites have obviously made a choice. The Spanish State and the oligarchy have already designed an educational model tailored to them. But far from believing that there is no alternative, in the face of all these oppressions, we students are clear about where our coordinates go.

As we have shown for many years, the student has an impressive ability to organize and spark struggles. Students who sharpen their pencils in the face of impositions and who, joining the educational community, are encouraged by the Basque Country for an educational system of their own and liberating, the Rigorous dynamic has given freshness to this course. But much remains to be done.

Those of us who fight for education to be for and from the people, above the cruel logic of the markets, must build sovereignty from education. Education must support the construction of socialism and feminism, and this will not be possible until the Basque Country can agree on its educational model. Independence is the key that opens the door for students to carry out an emancipatory project.

Students want to live and study in the Basque Country, with their own education that will be born from it and will be for the people. To build an educational system that is Basque, co-educational, participatory, collective, critical, feminist and not exclusive. Because we want and will make a Basque Country like this, the present of young people is in struggle!

Artola and Garikoitz Mancisidor.

Members of Ernai.