A conference on male violence. The journalist who wrote these lines went to a workshop on education, in which Arantxa Agirre participated. The members of the workshop have presented us. The side has done so: “I have experienced violence from my partner. Now I'm better, but I hope I don't know where I am now. I have two children and I've come to the education workshop because I'm worried about their future. They're both boys and I worry about how I'm going to educate them. They have also told me: Will we be like the father? I'm making an effort to educate on equality, but I think I'm against the wall. The school is not to the same extent, I would say it is going in the opposite direction. I'm afraid." The educational community is nothing more than a reflection of reality, reproduces the inequalities of everyday gender.

We went directly to a college to learn what they do to promote equality between boys and girls, and we landed at the Zaldupe Public School in Ondarroa (Bizkaia). They have many years of experience in co-education, starting on the road. They now have greater protection. The Equality Area of the City of Ondarroa coordinates all the schools of the town, is the third year that the co-educational program is launched. The Municipalities of Ondarroa and Markina-Xemein have made the diagnosis of perceptions and opinions of young people about sexist violence in Ondarroa and Markina-Xemein – available entirely on the website of the City Council of Ondarroa.

Let's go back to Zaldupe College. Around the discussion table were the director Mari Tere Kaltzakorta, the head of studies Gurutzne Anakabe and the educator of the Urtxintxa Leire Ercilla School and the educator of the Nahiko program that Emakunde has in the schools. The director of the centre has started talking about equality and has suddenly put football on the table. Zaldupe noted the first year that Emakunde extended the Nahiko program to schools, but by then he had already come a long way. Football was the starting point. At the end of the recess, it was common for the girls to complain to the teachers, that the boys did not let them play, that they were allowed to play, but that they did not have balls ... The tutors talked to the football boys about what was happening in the classroom and responded: “We don’t spend the ball because when the ball passes they protect themselves, they don’t touch, they don’t know how to play.” Kalakorta knows about the football battle: “We have been studying the use of the patio for many years and football has always been the star of the conflicts. It occupies a lot of space in the patio and creates problems. The moment the ball appears, violence appears, which is not controlled. They get obsessed with the ball, suddenly they become Llorente of Bilbao and I don't know what about the Real. We told them that the Real and Athletic games are not played at school, that everyone has to participate, but the kids have never understood it that way.” There's always some girl playing soccer with boys, but absolutely no girls and boys together. They do it because they know it's politically correct and the teachers look at it.

Hours of play without football

They have agreed with the students and have done so: on Tuesdays and Fridays at recess you cannot play with the ball. The distribution of uses of the patio has changed a lot, football barely occupies the patio and there are no classic divisions, that is, boys playing in the center and girls standing on the sides. They have managed to reach agreement with the students to two hours of play without football. On the road to equality, this is a test, but the difference is clear. Right now they are analyzing in depth the distribution of the use of the patio and will surely soon have new proposals on the table.

After years of fighting in football, with differences between boys and girls, in the course 2003-2004 a gap was made in the school to the Nahiko program of Emakunde. Today, they keep on with that. The project is made up of teachers, parents and pupils, but the director Kaltzakorta complained that from now on teachers will not receive direct training, that is to say they will have to pass on to the teachers what they have learned. We have asked them about the training of teachers in co-education and the three agree: they have a poor education, among other things because in the University School of Magisterium no subjects are taught about co-education or gender equality.

We have politically straight children.

Boys know that they have to let girls play with them at recess, even if they don't like it. Boys and girls know that any boy or girl, whether it's a boy or a girl, can play any sport, even if she then makes fun of the kid who does ballet. Educator Leire Ercilla develops a Co-Education Plan at Ondarroa Schools and has found that boys and girls are politically correct: “They sit in the circle, they start talking to them and they are very common from the point of view of equality. Also for 6 years. But when you stop talking, you have fun and you're ready to go down. ‘I never cry!’, the boy will say, for example.

Mari Tere, director of the Kaltzakorta College, told us a very remembered exercise: Children between the ages of 11 and 12 had to write on paper who did homework at home and how long it took to do each activity. Calcakorta was provocative and the children became chaotic with the exercise: “Do you have breakfast prepared, the mother has risen before you to prepare it? Why do you have prepared clothes? How has breakfast milk come to the refrigerator? Listen! But if you have served your parents all the hours of the day and have not had time to sleep! Let’s say now that your little brother has become ill and someone has to take care of him...” The exercise showed a lot of things, most of the household chores were done by the mother, but also more: “They didn’t realize the weight of household chores. How will you remember that almost everything is done by the mother if you don’t realize the terrible housework?” Yes, there was no difference between boys and girls who seemed less responsible.

Purple glasses are not for sale

The younger, the harder it is to detect gender inequalities, at least so does Ercilla: “The teachers of Early Childhood Education told me that at those ages the differences between boys and girls are not as obvious as they are later. It's true, but some Early Childhood Education teachers have a lot of resistance and they'll tell you. ‘We treat boys and girls alike.’ At these ages it is more difficult to detect inequalities, the roles are not so defined. Everyone has their fingernails painted for 2-3 years, and nothing happens. For 6 years, they are not painted or cut off.” The galley continued: “If you’re a child, yes, but you don’t imagine a 12-year-old with your fingernails painted and it doesn’t have to be that way.” Kaltzakorta, Ercilla and Anakabe agree that we are well taken on board the idea that we have achieved gender equality and that it is difficult for them to detect the differences between boys and girls. Leire Ercilla referred to the need to wear purple glasses and Kaltzakorta added that such colour glasses can only be obtained in some cases because they are not on sale in the shops because they are not fashionable. Working on gender equality in the middle is not teaching mathematics. We asked the three of the table: teachers who teach the educational units of equality must be aware of gender equality, right? Ercilla responds: “It’s a bad thing, because it forces you to study your daily life, you have to look at your life, because this issue is not a problem of school, of the family, of the street... It's everybody's. La Calcita gives us the example of the jersey: “It’s not a sweater that gets dressed and removed, you have to put it in the skin. You have to live with that, and it has no beginning or end. That’s why 8 March and 25 November are important days of reclaiming and we’ll do something special, but we know that these are specific days.”