From schools-bosque to “libertarian”: ‘anti-system’ schools do not stop growing and there are more than 500 in Spain

It was precisely in a free school in San Sebastián in which, a few days ago, two teachers accused of sexual assault on a 4 -year -old girl were arrested. The Emeki Emeki Center, according to its website, “has as a engine of learning the game from pleasure and intellectual curiosity” and as an ideologist to Wilhelm Reich, a famous psychoanalyst for its contributions to sexology. The methodology is especially controversial in the current circumstances, with two teachers investigated for having committed an alleged crime of a sexual nature.

But that of San Sebastián is not the only center with methods fleeing the traditional. In schools-bosque, for example, education takes place outdoors and Game with “Pineapples or branches” It has a central role. Paideia free school, for bringing another case, follows a pedagogy “Anti -capitalist” and “anti -authoritarian”; And in democratic schools, assistance is not mandatory and “the community is self -regulated” through a series of rules that the students themselves vote.

After the incident at the Donostiarra school, voices have emerged wondering what type of control is carried out with these centers. Even more when the Basque Country Education Ministry has washed your hands. According to the counselor Begoña Pedrosa, the Emeki Emeki center was outside the control radar of the Department of Education. Pedrosa also indicated that the school «does not receive any public fund and Nor has an administrative authorization by the department ».

However, the Ministry of Education requires ABC that any educational center – although children from 0 to 6 years (period in which schooling is not mandatory) – “needs the permission of the Autonomous Community to open.” As this newspaper has been able to verify, most of these alternative schools They go to children as children. And it is not accidental. «The subsistence within the system of these pedagogies is increasingly simple and, in addition, in the first courses, the Contents are easily adaptable to the minimums that are set by law, ”says José Manuel Lacasa, educational researcher at the head of IFIE (Institute F of Educational Research).

The loe and the first ‘boom’

It was the approval of the Loe (Organic Law of Education) in 2006 which allowed this type of pedagogies to begin to grow in our country, although the Lomce (2013) and the Lomloe (2020) followed along the same path. «One thing is what the centers do and a very different one what they say they do. There have never been any type of consequences for those who obtain bad results, ”he says. This analyst also indicates that free schools are a sample more «of the disruption of the educational system, in which Knowledge doesn’t care about almost anyone». The philosophy that prevails, he says, is none other than the search for the child’s absolute happiness.

These new conceptions are not alien to some pedagogical currents that «advocate the school welfare as supreme value», According to Francisco López Rupérez, who is former president of the State School and Researcher Council in Educational Policy.

Elitism that does not enter the system

Paradoxically, these ‘anti -system’ formulas They are not the ideals for those children born within Families with less resources. “The so -called structured teaching has revealed especially effective in disadvantage environments,” says Rupérez. On the other hand, some of the alternative pedagogies, such as democratic schools, have been judged throughout their history as “elitists.” That is the case of Summerhill, In the United Kingdom, the most iconic of free and democratic schools in which there are no exams and where happiness is the maximum educational aspiration. In Lacasa’s words, «there is evidence that Summerhill only works for students with high economic resources. But not with the lower classes, even with the socks ».

The importance of the postal code

But how determining is the methodology for obtaining good academic results in schools? Eparquio Delgado, who is a psychologist, disseminator and member of society for the advancement of the scientific study of behavior, says that socio -economic variables are the ones that most influence the results and not the use of a pedagogy or another. That is, issues such as Postal code, the level of parents’ studies or the students-professor ratio They condition more than the fact that the student attended primary school in a Waldorf center or in a free school led by anarchists.

The Society of Selfayuda and the Milagro Methods

The problem, as Delgado poses, is that “we live in the society of self -help books, where the individual always hopes to run into a miraculous method, also in the educational field.” In any case, this professional insists that all these alternative pedagogies cannot be put in the same bag. And makes a differentiation between Montessori, whose formulas have been imitated by the old school or other “more extreme, pseudoscientific and esoteric.” He also believes that many theories without a scientific basis are found perfectly integrated within the “official system” such as, for example, neuroscience, to which the Ministry of Education has alluded to in any of its publications on social networks. “In the Canary Islands we have a subject called ‘excite’ that is taught in primary school in all schools and has caused bewilderment among many teachers,” exemplifies this psychologist.

The traditional system is not perfect, but should the State monitor more alternative pedagogies? The question is especially delicate, because the Freedom of families To choose the education they want for their children, it is a fundamental right covered by the Spanish Constitution in its article 27. But, it is also possible to ask where the educational inspection was in the Donostiarra free school that has a psychoanalyst disciple of Freud obsessed with the energy that is released during orgasm.