groupings of teachers and families of the Valencian Community such as Languages and Education and the Platform of Teachers for Linguistic Freedom, or nationally such as Hablamos Español have reopened after the 28M elections the debate on the unification of the Selectivity. A teacher of Spanish Language, Ivan Teruelalready warned in a conference in Alicante of the “potential grievance” for some students who may suffer discrimination.
“The hours weekly of class in Spanish they affect the University Access Tests”, argued this teacher, based on his own experience and the perception of other colleagues of his by profession in various autonomies.
In his opinion, it is clear that “you cannot compare the domain of the Spanish between the students of the different Autonomous Communities”, due among other reasons, in addition to these differences in teaching time in the centers during the course, to the fact that later in the Selectivity exams “the degree of disparity is so high that it produces a absolute distortion» in those evaluations.
For this reason, Teruel stressed that “one of the founding principles” of platforms such as Escuela de Todos – made up of twenty associations from all over Spain – lies precisely in its “demand for the unification of the University Access Tests” .
These evaluations have begun to be carried out this week in the Valencian Community and some other autonomies, and will continue in the coming days in the rest. The change of government in some of these territories after the last elections in May now raises hope among this part of the educational community to achieve the objective of a single and harmonized exam for all.
On the other hand, the risks of maintaining this current system with 17 different exams, one per region, are not mere speculation, but that “it causes a potential tort to those students who take the Spanish language exam in the communities that have more demanding criteria”.
This professor gave a clear example: a student with a grade of 9 in Spanish in the Balearic Islands could go to Extremadura and “take the place” at the University from another in Extremadura with the same grade, if both had made five spelling mistakes . Because? Simply, because in the islands these errors do not penalize while in the other autonomy they entail a direct failure, regardless of the grade obtained by the student.
In this way, he also dismantled the cliché pronounced by the former president of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Artur Mas, in the sense that “in Catalonia, Spanish is spoken better than in Madrid.”
“Barrier to mobility”
The I Conference on Everyone’s School held in Alicante have not been the only forum in which Iván Teruel has advocated a change and also previously disseminated together with other teachers, in a YouTube video of the Assembly for a Bilingual school in Catalonia (AEB), a protest message.
«We want a school dedicated to education and the future and of our children, that is not a barrier for the mobility with other autonomous communities and that also favors the integration of students from other countries and who have Spanish as their mother tongue”, were his words. His comparison between a student from the Balearic Islands and a student from Extremadura fits this message.
