The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The presence of plainclothes Mossos d’Esquadra in schools to offer help and provide knowledge on security and prevention can be a good initiative… if done well. It can never be presented as an imposition and without having spoken with the pedagogues and teachers of each educational center. Otherwise, what is happening in Catalonia occurs, where yesterday two demonstrations of rejection were already registered in two centers in l’Hospitalet that have been chosen by the Government to carry out this pilot test.
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Teachers and students criticized the measure, arguing that schools need pedagogical and social resources, not police resources. If, in addition, the measure has been launched coinciding with teachers’ protests for the improvement of their working conditions, the result can be an explosive cocktail.
It is easy to fall into demagoguery and fuel the protest with the phrase that students “are people and not criminals”. No. Surely the intention of the Generalitat is not to send riot police to impose law and order in classrooms, but quite the opposite: to assign personnel trained in mediating public order problems with the mission of preventing rather than repressing. And it is also true that some teachers have difficulties in carrying out their teaching in some centers due to the conflictiveness of some students. Admitting this does not criminalize anyone. The problem is that the solution must be done with dialogue and under the radar. Once the issue has reached the media, the difficulties multiply. And it is a mistake for the Generalitat to have designated a series of institutes to carry out this pilot test, because here it does mark some centers as potentially conflictive.
The presence of preventive police in schools can be positive. But first, centers should be provided with more psychologists, social educators, or pedagogues. When there is a deficit of this type of personnel, thinking that the solution involves plainclothes officers is a mistake. Rectifying the step will be complicated.
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