By Lauren Sieben
The main corridor of Pedro Garfias in Seville overflows with the decorative staples of an elementary school – artwork from preschoolers: noodles and rice glued to finger-painted paper plates. Poems from the third year students, one titled “Andalucía es bonita” – “Andalusia is Pretty” – written in rainbow block letters. A crayon-colored map of the region hangs on the opposite wall, each province identified by its coat of arms. A photo of the Giralda covers half of Seville.
On the second floor of the school, 11- and 12-year-olds attend an Education for Citizenship and the Human Rights class mandated by the Spanish government alongside their normal courses. At this age they’re expected to move beyond rainbow-embellished poems to develop their individual roles as citizens.
Antonio Murillo Segovia teaches the citizenship course at Pedro Garfias and defines its goal simply: that each student learns to be a “good person.” “Math is good, learning a foreign language is good, English is good,” Murillo says. “But the important thing is that students be good people. That they act as citizens.”
Murillo’s curriculum hinges on three pillars: interpersonal and societal relationships, life in the community and living in society. “Citizenship” isn’t restricted to voting, democracy or politics. Students study the innate differences between men and women, cultural diversity and religious tolerance, among other topics.
One Monday in April, Murillo’s students respond to the week’s top headline from Toledo – a 14-year-old girl accused of murdering her 13-year-old classmate. Murillo projects a newspaper article on a screen in front of the room, and the discussion segues into how students can resolve conflict and avoid such extremes.
Although Murillo defines its principles concisely, the true goal of the course is hazy for many Spaniards. Educación para la ciudadanía y los derechos humanos, better known for its shortened name, Education for Citizenship, has been at the center of controversy since its introduction in 2007 by president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The class came to Spain following a 2002 recommendation by the Council of Europe that all member countries create a course in democratic citizenship that corresponds with the Council’s primary task of “promoting a free, tolerant and just society,” according to the recommendation.
Students are required to take the course in elementary school and again in high school at all public, state-subsidized and private institutions. The values outlined in the curriculum have stirred opposition from parents, educators and, above all, Catholic schools and church affiliates.
The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party – the current governing body in Spain – created the course, and some opponents consider it a blatant form of socialist indoctrination in the nation’s schools.
Juan Manuel Rodríguez, the diocesan delegate for education in Seville, says the Catholic Church’s main concern is protecting parents’ rights to form their children’s moral upbringing. “What the church wants is for Education for Citizenship to respect the rights and beliefs of parents,” Rodríguez explains. “Not to teach Christian morality to all students.”
Rodríguez, who also teaches Catholicism at a public high school in Carmona, thinks a more general ethics class that avoids socially controversial topics would better serve the majority of students. “The problem is when one group wants to impose their morality on everyone else,” he argues. “We need to be respectful of everyone and not utilize education as an arm of confrontation.”
Critics are quick to highlight course content that contradicts Catholic beliefs, which many students learn at school alongside the citizenship course. At Pedro Garfias, a public school, about half of the students are enrolled in a Catholic religion class, an optional course in all state-funded schools.
On the opposite end of Seville, students flood the exit of the Claret school at 5:30 p.m. clad in blue polo uniforms. Unlike Pedro Garfias’ finger-painted paper plates, the entranceway boasts a portrait of San Antonio María Claret, a 19th century apostolic missionary and the founder of the school.
Antonio Ruiz Lozano teaches math at Claret and all of his four children attend the state-subsidized Catholic school, considered one of the 100 best private schools in Spain by El Mundo’s yearly review. Before teaching at Claret, Ruiz worked as a missionary in Paraguay and Portugal with the Congregación de la Sagrada Familia.
Given his Catholic foundation, public education was never an option for Ruiz’s children. “For a parent with certain religious convictions it becomes impossible to opt for public education, because it doesn’t offer a religious education,” Ruiz says. “Legally, they have to offer it. But public schools don’t create a respectful climate towards this option. And it shouldn’t be like that.”
By law, Claret students must complete Education for Citizenship. But parental opposition inevitably accompanies this requirement at a semi-private school with a clear Catholic mission. “The instructor teaching the citizenship class to my children is someone I know personally, and I know he isn’t saying anything against what I believe,” Ruiz explains. “He may not think exactly the same as me, but he teaches the course in agreement with the educational project of the school.”
Antonio Murillo also notes that the citizenship course varies immensely based on each instructor’s interpretation of the material. Murillo, like Ruiz, is a practicing Catholic, but doesn’t see the course as contradictory to religious education.
Education for Citizenship addresses same-sex marriage, which is legal in Spain and opposes the rigid Christian interpretation of marriage as a heterosexual union. “I teach that the law in Spain allows marriage between men and men, women and women, men and women,” Murillo describes. “If the law changes tomorrow, I’ll teach something else, even though as a Christian I believe that the ideal marriage is between a man and a woman.”
Christians for Socialism, a group founded by members of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, released a declaration of support for the course in 2007. The group argues that Education for Citizenship doesn’t threaten Catholic parents’ right to create a religious upbringing for their children.
“We understand that bishops can’t deny the right of the educational system and of the state to carry out an active role through an ethical-civic course, like Education for Citizenship,” the group stated. “[The course] is based on our society’s shared values, a good part of which were contributed historically and at present by Catholicism itself.”
Despite insistence from supporters that the course doesn’t aim to mold students’ values, some scholars have argued otherwise through comparative studies between Spain and other countries.
Bianca Thoillez, a graduate in pedagogy and faculty member at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, compared Education for Citizenship with a government class taught in Anchorage, Alaska, in a 2008 study. Thoillez found that unlike the government class in Alaska, which focuses primarily on the structure of the state and history of democracy, Education for Citizenship includes “moral and emotional formation.” And to Thoillez, the issues addressed in the Anchorage class are more relevant to citizenship than the moral undertone present in Spain’s curriculum.
“The troublesome aspect of the course in Spain isn’t the ‘sensitive’ subjects that it addresses,” Thoillez says. “But that to make space for these subjects, the course neglects topics that are truly important for civic education.”
Non-Catholics have been equally vocal in their dissent to the course. Some parents, regardless of religious conviction – or lack thereof – think the course does little to enrich their children’s education.
Miguel Castillón, a graphic designer in Seville raised with a Catholic upbringing, sent both of his children to the private, non-state-subsidized Colegio Alemán (German School) in Seville. Like Claret, the Colegio Alemán is among El Mundo’s top 100 private schools in the nation. Unlike Claret, its educational mission is secular.
Castillón’s youngest son told his father simply that the course was “nonsense.” Castillón’s own critique of the class isn’t rooted in Catholicism. He is a self-described atheist and chose a secular school for his children to avoid putting his sons through Catholic education. “The course is an attempt to teach etiquette, and you don’t learn etiquette studying throughout the school year,” Castillón says. “You learn it through your parents, your neighbors, your peers, from people in general.”
Basque philosopher Fernando Savater has also criticized the citizenship class from a liberal, non-Catholic standpoint in several editorials and interviews. Savater, however, contends that parents serving as the sole instructors of morality is a “monstrous” proposition.
“Institutional education has not only the right but the obligation to teach shared values and morals,” Savater said in a 2006 editorial for El País. “Not to kill moral pluralism, but precisely to allow a framework for coexistence.”
Parents groups have challenged Education for Citizenship in the Spanish court system, and in January 2009 the Supreme Court voted against allowing parents a petition for conscience objection of their children’s participation. In March, the Alliance Defense Fund filed a lawsuit on behalf of over 300 Spanish parents in the European Court of Human Rights against Education for Citizenship for what the Fund considers “anti-Christian education.”
Although Education for Citizenship has an abundance of critics on all ends of the debate, a conclusive remedy to the controversy is likely far off. Murillo, who teaches citizenship to his 11- and 12-year-old students, also recognizes the space and even the necessity for change within the course. “The course could be better, yes,” he says. “But the politics issue is the same everywhere. If one party imposes the course, the other won’t be in complete agreement.”
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