Madrid, Spain, Feb 18, 2009 / 19:51 pm
Organizations opposed to Education for the Citizenry are praising four rulings from the Supreme Court which, while they refuse to acknowledge conscientious objection, recognize the essence of the debate and reject any kind of ideological indoctrination in Spanish schools.
“What the Supreme Court has done is issue a serious warning to the government, to the entire educational system, to schools and teachers, that they should not fall into the temptation to use Education for the Citizenry to indoctrinate Spanish children,” the civil rights watchdog website Hazteoir.org stated. “By rejecting indoctrination by the government, the rulings make conscientious objection unnecessary, as long as the education officials follow them and implement them.”
The website noted that parents who objected were not against their children being taught morals in the abstract, but that they were against the “indoctrination it [the course] masks.” It praised they “total” triumph of the Court rulings which warned that “in a democratic society, it should not be the educational Administration—or the schools or specific teachers either—who set themselves up as the arbiters of controversial moral questions.”
In addition, the rulings point out that if a particular educational program or textbook is shown to contain indoctrination, the Courts can be petitioned to use “whatever means necessary to immediately halt that activity.”