Summary

While the latest PISA and OECD reports show that Spanish students are at the tail-end of Europe in terms of knowledge and that they are at the front-end of Europe in terms of violence and school dropout rates (one in every three pupils has not finished compulsory studies), Zapatero, who has passed the LOE (the Organic Law on Education, a new form of the previous LOGSE), tries to conceal his tremendous educational failure by allowing pupils to proceed to the following grade with up to four failed subjects. The only thing that seems to matter to him is the implementation of a compulsory subject with a clear doctrinal and political content. Zapatero says that Education for Citizenship teaches constitutional values and human rights, but he is not telling the truth: the manuals praise communist dictatorships, they consider that the regimes of Lenin and Stalin were democracies, they criticise liberal thought, they justify Islamist terrorism and they extol Zapatero himself. Zapatero’s Education for Citizenship represents intolerable meddling on the part of the State, which also goes against the constitutional freedom that parents have of choosing the education they want for their children, it infringes the constitutional prohibition of indoctrinating pupils and it seeks to impose a secular religion in the form of this ‘catechism for good socialists’, the only subject that really matters to this Government.