Presentation issue 12º

Once again, the Avances magazine, when dedicating its monographic issue to the Educational Pact, has been attentive to the discussion of society's concerns about education, since this, for the first time, has been part of the political, social and academic agenda In our country. A Pact has been tried as a strategy, as a way to build a more participatory and active society, making everyone jointly responsible for the construction of a society based on knowledge and, therefore, freer and more just. In the heat of the impulse to the Educational Pact proposed by the Ministry of Education, we have asked a host of experts to offer us their experience and vision on the meaning of the Educational Pact, on its lines, the concepts on which it is woven, its possibilities and limits. The challenge is crucial, because in a Pact the tensions around education converge to create a consensus order on the type of training we want in our young people, the aims and objectives we seek, the function and training of their teachers, the evaluation as a quality instrument and citizenship as a way to integrate different cultures in a complex society such as Spain, without forgetting the fit of two spheres that have to be harmonized, the state and the autonomic. And all wrapped up in a framework of sense and inescapable experience: the political and, therefore, ideological positions of the actors involved.

To help us understand this process of Pact, debate about the aims and what is intended with education, have come to collaborate with the journal Avances various educational experts. From the hand of Juan Carlos Tedesco, who in his day took us into the slippery ground of the Pact with his book, published in 1995, The new educational pact, we will understand a series of categories of analysis for its dissection, namely: pact, agreement and social consensus. The title of his article, "Ten Notes on the social and educational pact", expresses the meaning it gives to the pact: it is political, because the democratic society is directed from the political sphere, but it is also social, since the political decision must be supported and accompanied by the consensus of the different agents of society. Manuel de Puelles, after framing the Pact in its historical and political context, not only reveals the meaning of its history since the birth of our Constitution, but also descends to the practical terrain to approach the reasons for its need and its recent failure. . Alejandro Tiana, in his article "In search of consensus in education: the experience of the LOE", from the perspective granted by the Secretary of State of the Ministry of Education that once occupied, details the attempts to build an educational pact in those years between 2004 and 2006, explaining the reasons for a relative failure, because the law that would end up approving the Parliament in 2006, in his opinion, being a law built with broad agreements, constitutes an important advance in the desired educational pact. Santiago Esteban Frades reviews what he calls the conditions and precedents of the Educational and Social Pact in Spain, that is, the conditioning factor of the 1978 Constitution, the Pacts of the Moncloa, the programs of the political parties, the social initiatives had to boost it; in short, an account of the experiences, of the attempts, of the failures, of the advances around the Covenant from the very birth of our democracy. Juan López, current Deputy Director General of Academic Organization of the Ministry of Education, delves into the basic objectives and proposals on which the Ministry intends to build the Educational Pact; a Pact of minimums that preserves the ideological and inalienable positions of the political parties. A Pact that in its initial pretension to add to it the political parties with possibilities of directing the government action in the coming years has failed, if we understand as such the resignation of its formalized signature on May 5, 2010. But the document, on the contrary, to the extent that it collects the essential problems of Spanish education of these moments, is constituted in a language, in an interpretation of their needs, their possibilities, which surely, as a philosopher would say, will generate dialectic and, consequently, it will not be a barren document.

Different approaches, subordinated from different perspectives of analysis to a clarification goal, in addition to responding to the current political and social situation in the educational field, also point to another outstanding aspect: the presence of collaborators of different academic and administrative origin, which stands out the growing consolidation of our magazine. We can only thank the authors for their interesting contributions, as readers will verify, to an issue that concerns us all and that we hope will soon be reclaimed, welcomed again and end up germinating between the broad and multiple arc of education.

The editorial board.