Call it a case of Beauty and the Beast leading the masses. Only in this non-Disney version, the Beauty was the former Miss World, Mariasela Alvares, and the Beast was a burro. Both were in Madrid Saturday protesting the Spanish Socialist government's education bill - a bill containing more than 1,800 amendments.
Late Sunday the government said it would meet with the organizers of the protest. No date has been announced yet for the meeting. None of the associations that participated in the demonstration have expressed optimism that the Socialist government will not only listen to their demands, but make substantial changes in its education bill (called the Ley Orgánica de Educación) - most fear this may just be a photo opportunity managed by the government to rank up the Prime Minister's slumping results in recent surveys. According to recent polls the Socialist government is now trailing the opposition party Partido Popular in potential voters if there were early elections. Alejandro Tiana, the Secretary of Education for the Spanish government, said Sunday the demonstration was full of "mis-truths" with regard to the government's bill.
At the end of Saturday's demonstration Alvarez read the final declaration - including a call to meet with the Spanish government - while the Burro opened the demonstration sporting a black sheet with white numbers: 1 + 1 = 3. The equation was an allusion that this bill if approved could convert students into burros that won't be able to perform simple math.
The Miss World Beauty and Burro were joined by hundreds of thousands of people who braved chilly autumn air late Saturday in the Spanish capital to protest the government's new education bill. Various religious and parent organizations also expressed their discontent for the bill. The Spanish Catholic bishops supported the demonstration. No major education association backs the bill.
Amid the protest's festive air, that included balloons and singing to the improvised lyrics "a little burro like you," aimed at Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, there were also multiple signs reading "Zapatero receives a zero" or "Zapatero, multiply that by zero," coupled by chants calling for his dimission. One group carried a large sign claiming to be an association of "Victims of Zapatero." More radical posters had a Zapatero that looked like Stalin begging for parents to "give him their children," while one poster equated Zapatero with Satan.
At Saturday's demonstration there were also multiple posters supporting the Catholic church, and in particular the Spanish bishops, the most prolific being "Bishops be brave, you are not alone," reflecting the crisp relations existing between the bishops and the Spanish government.
Those relations have taken such a negative turn that Spain's Deputy Prime Minister Teresa Fernandez de la Vega this past Thursday traveled to Rome to meet with Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano. While that meeting was said to have been arranged months ago, and was supposed to be secret, press close to the government claimed that news of the meeting was leaked by the Vatican. Details of the meeting, however, have not been released.
While the Spanish bishops supported the demonstration, none of the top bishops from its leadership were seen at the demonstration. This led some Spanish press to suggest that talks could be ongoing between the Church and the State with regard to details of the education bill. Church officials, however, have denied this is the case.
The president of the Mohammed Akhtar Al-Qaim Islamic Center in Barcelona, Mohammed Akhtar said he too is opposed to the bill, according to the news agency Europa Press. In that article, Akhtar said that he fears once the government "finishes" with Catholic religion courses in schools, it will then turn its attention to Islamic education. "It is necessary that they teach religion in the schools, whether it be Catholicism, Judaism or Islam," Akhtar said, according to Europa Press.
As in earlier demonstrations of this nature against government legislation there was a battle of the numbers. According to the demonstration organizers Madrid's street swelled with 2 million protestors, while the Madrid government estimated the number at closer to 1.5 million. However, the Spanish government said 406,757 demonstrators took to the street, while the most-widely read newspaper in Spain, the left-center El Pais said only 375,000 people attended the demonstration. In the June pro-family demonstration, which also protested the same-sex marriage legislation, the organizers of that event said 1.5 million people attended the demonstration, while El Pais said there were only around 100,000.
As reported by Spero News, all parties are in agreement that Spain's education system needs an overhaul - a recent Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development report of 40 countries said Spanish students are failing in mathematics, science and reading, and have a high rate of absenteeism. The country also has one of the highest drop-out rates in Europe.
Those opposed to the Socialist government's education proposal say it is headed in the wrong way. Among other things it will decentralize education, creating not one state system, but 17 separate, provincial systems. As the bill stands now, parents would find it increasingly difficult to select the schools that their children attend as they would first need the regional government's approval before changing schools. This is a dangerous precendent, critics of the bill say, since it could allow the government to disapprove of a student being sent to a school that is not public. There are even fears that the government intends to restrict access to single-sex schools, which are usually run by Catholic associations.
In that vein, the Catholic Church has expressed its opposition to the government's plan to alter the character of religious education courses. Among other things, such courses would not be obligatory or graded.
For some readers this concept of having graded religion courses in schools may be unsettling. However, in Spain this is result of an earlier agreement between the Vatican and Spain when drawing up its 1978 constitution.
"The Spanish state is aconfessional, but the public powers [in the Constitution] promise to take into account the religious beliefs of Spanish society and to cooperate with the Catholic Church and other religions,” said Daniel Tirapu, a canon lawyer and professor at the University of Jaen in southern Spain in an earlier Spero article. “This is the complete framework with which religion must be treated in Spain."
According to Country Studies report of the US Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, "religion was also a factor in the formulation of constitutional provisions concerning education. There was considerable controversy over the issue of providing private schools with public funds, because in Spain most private schools are run by the church or by the religious orders. The Constitution guarantees freedom of education and calls for the government to provide some financial assistance to private schools. It further stipulates that children in state schools may receive religious teaching, if their parents so desire. At the same time, the Constitution gives the government the authority to inspect and to license the schools, thus granting it some control over the institutions it subsidizes. Conflicts over this issue of state control led to the passage in 1984 of the Organic Law on the Right to Education (Ley Organica del Derecho a la Educacion-- LODE), which established three categories of schools and set forth conditions to be met by private institutions receiving financial aid from the government."
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