With Youth Unemployment At 55 Percent, Spanish Students Take To The Streets

MADRID — On most weekday afternoons, 21-year-old Spanish student John Suarez is sitting in class at his school on the outskirts of Madrid. But this Wednesday, Suarez stood in the city’s central square amid a crowd of striking students, protesting against budget cuts and education reform in Spain.

“If you cut money for education, you ruin the future of many people,” Suarez said. “The politicians are screwing everything up.”

High school and university students throughout Spain went on strike Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, their second three-day strike this school year.

The strike was a reminder that although Spain’s banks are showing signs of recovery — the International Monetary Fund issued an optimistic statement on the financial sector Monday — many Spaniards are still restless, especially young people.

The unemployment rate in Spain has climbed to 26 percent, according to the latest government statistics. And the unemployment rate for those under 25 years old has shot up to 55 percent.

It is unclear how many students went on strike this week. The government said 17 percent of high school students participated in Wednesday’s strike. But the Spanish Students Union, which organized the strike, said 80 to 90 percent of high school students participated.

(Full disclosure: I am an English teaching assistant in a public school in Madrid.)

“I’m in favor of the strike because I think the politicians are disgracing public education by privatizing everything,” said Cosme Verdugo, an 18-year-old university student in Madrid.

But some students joined the strikes simply to miss school, Verdugo said. “They don’t go to class because they don’t care. It’s just another day without class, like an extra-long weekend.”

Spain’s controlling political party, the center-right Popular Party, passed plans in May to save over $4 billion with a series of measures, including increases to tuition, teachers’ work hours and student-teacher ratios.

The Popular Party has also put forth a controversial proposal to overhaul the public education system that would emphasize mathematics, sciences and foreign languages over other subjects and require more standardized testing. Critics say the changes would limit freedom in the classroom and result in thousands of fired teachers.

But Luis Peral Guerra, a Popular Party senator and former head of the Madrid education department, said the changes would not only save money but would also make Spain’s struggling school system more effective.

Spain spends 28 percent more on education per student than the average European country, according to a report released last year by the Spanish government. Yet its students score below the European average on international tests.

“It’s not a matter of throwing money at public education,” Peral Guerra said. “In terms of teachers and money, we stack up well with other countries that are richer than us. Yet still, our results are not satisfactory.”

The Popular Party also published a statement yesterday saying it would pass a law offering incentives to companies who hired anyone under 30 years old.

The IMF predicts that Spanish unemployment will decrease slightly next year but will remain above 20 percent until 2017.