Alberto Mendez’s novel Blind Sunflowers has left the list of compulsory reading for high school students. The work, which deals with the repression during the Civil War and the dictatorship, will be replaced by The Back Room, by Carmen Martin Gaite , set in late Francoism.
The news has caused some controversy on social networks , where many users have shown their discomfort at what they consider censorship by the Andalusian Government PP-Ciudadanos.
Others, on the other hand, have taken advantage of those same social networks to deny some of the news published in this regard.
No, the Andalusian Government of PP and Cs has not suppressed the work on the Francoist repression ‘The blind sunflowers’, by Alberto Mendez, from the compulsory readings for Selectivity. It has been done, as always, by a mixed commission made up of high school and university teachers. pic.twitter.com/kg4wZvmBrI
— Dani Cela (@DaniCela8) July 10, 2019
To all of you who are outraged by the false story of The Blind Sunflowers: the Philosophy Professors Commission of Andalusia has approved that Nietzsche return to Selectividad, which was withdrawn when the PSOE governed in Andalusia. Let the teachers do their job
— Pablo Bujalance (@pbujalance) July 10, 2019
From the Ministry of Education directed by Javier Imbroda, it is recalled that the reading recommendations for the second year of Baccalaureate, with a view to Selectivity, are established by a presentation made up of university and Baccalaureate teachers and that it is the provincial delegations of Education that choose the Baccalaureate teachers who participate in the coordination commission, an autonomous body with representatives from each of the Andalusian public universities.
Education frames the withdrawal of Mendez’s work in the “usual renewal process” by which they have entered or left this list in recent years (to return, in some cases, some time later) titles such as Chronicle of a death foretold of Gabriel Garcia Marquez,Juan Ramon Jimenez , the Machados or the Generation of 27 .
Coincidentally, one of the texts of the Spanish Language and Literature II exercise of Selectivity has been extracted from Blind Sunflowers .The other option was an article by Pepa Bueno published in El Pais.
In the next course, 2019-2020, the readings will be Reality and Desire , by Luis Cernuda; The Tree of Science , by Pio Baroja; The back room , by Carmen Martin Gaite, and History of a staircase , by Antonio Buero Vallejo.
The Board also recalls, after the controversy raised, the autonomy available to educational centers, which propose and approve recommended reading works in their cloisters.
