By Susana Díaz, president of CADE 2025 of IPAE Business Action
Recently a high school student asked me if Voting served something. His tone was not of rebellion, but of sincere disappointment. And I don’t know what to answer immediately. Because behind that question there is not only a doubt about the system, but a cry for being heard.
In these years, I have seen a generation of brilliant, sensitive young people, capable of mobilizing due to social causes, the environment or equality grow in our classrooms. And at the same time, I have witnessed how that same generation feels excluded from the spaces where the country’s course is decided. As if democracy did not belong to them.
That is why I deeply believe in the power of education to heal that wound and rebuild trust between adolescents and their institutions. It is not about dictating one more class about civism, but about training citizenship from experience, from practice, from the daily life of school.
Educate in democratic values should be part of the DNA of our schools. Each tutoring, each student advice, each space for dialogue is an opportunity to teach what to dissent is not to divide, that listening to the other is to respect, that the public is also ours. Democracy is not reduced to the act of voting: it is a way of living together.
In that line, the School Cade is born, the meeting organized by IPAE with the support of International Idea and the European Union. It will not be a space of speeches, but of transformative experiences with debates that simulate parliamentary life, citizen innovation laboratories, correspondent workshops, creation of video games with democratic values and lunches with leaders who inspire from the proximity. Each school will attend with a tutor that will also be formed, and then multiply what has been learned in their community. Thus, what begins on a forum day becomes a seed that blooms in schools throughout the country.
In this context, marked by political uncertainty and the closeness of a new electoral process, we have the responsibility of doing something different. We cannot continue regretting youth disconnection with democracy without offering real spaces for their participation. This first edition of Cade School seeks to give that answer and raises an experience where active citizens cease to be theory and becomes experience.
Participation cannot stay in formal channels. Young people cry for changing the criteria with which decisions are made: that they cease to be marked by particular interests and settle in values of solidarity, tolerance, dialogue and consensus in favor of the common good. Democracy is not built only at the polls, but in the practice of values that make us better people for a better society.
We want this forum to be a starting point. That adolescents not only understand what democracy is, but to experience how it is built with others, how it defends with ideas and how it transforms with commitment. Because if we aspire to a more fair country, we need to start by forming a generation that creates, and is created, capable of making it possible.
