What is education?
Education is that which will never be taken away from us.
It is the greatest weapon against exclusion.
Something that marked
my life immensely was when they did not want me
in high school because I had to skive off due to surgeries.
What an unjustified reason! Don't you think?
Or for medical check-ups
There I learned to stand up for my rights.
It was also extremely important when I arrived at the UNED
and a person from UNIDIS, Alejandra Pereira, showed me
all the possibilities of adaptations that they offered.
-How do we solve or overcome these barriers,
inconveniences that we find?
It is the day-to-day. When one is younger,
I was always in the front row in class,
even at university.
Technical aid,
what was the modulated frequency transmitter
to be able to access the teacher's explanations,
which started at university, because obviously
the disability is your travel companion.
She gets older with you,
it is not that you hear better, it is worse, so
with the passage of the stages, you find
that you have to solve it in a different way, not always the same.
The vital milestones are the same for anyone,
whether it is transit to university
or your first job or a change of job.
The milestones are the same, the thing
is that the additional factor that you have to considerate
is disability.
It is like... it conditions.
Sometimes it favours you, for example,
I am at UNED because in 2009, no, sorry, 2007,
which is the year before the creation of UNIDIS,
the Governing Council approved
the creation of a service
that assisted students with disabilities
and the condition was that one of the workers had a disability.
So, it was a favourable transit,
but maybe one asks oneself, was it really my curriculum
or the institutional image?
-Education is a possibility, it is an opportunity,
the higher the education, the greater the work inclusion.
We still have a lot to do, but with education
our value is not questioned.
Yes, it is true that our disability is often visible,
but whether visible or invisible,
education always changes the mental structure.
It not only gives you. power to defend yourself,
but also to interact as equals.
-Disability has always been visible,
except in some disabilities that are not manifested,
such as an organic disability or a mental illness,
but we are almost always evident.
The thing is
that the less, the better, that is what we have sought.
They have to be good examples to promote the idea of inclusion,
that you have to have good models to be able
to favor equality, defeat these prejudices,
but the reality of each person, of each of those individualities,
undermines the foundations of idealistic inclusion.
-We have to increase the rates of educational inclusion,
it has to be an excellent education
and reduce the gap of employment,
which right now is around 73.9% of unemployment.
What is the solution to unemployment?
That they give us opportunities,
but the higher the education, the more opportunities we will have.
So education is an essential part of our identity
and no one will be able to take it away from us.
Investing in education
is the best thing we can do in our lives.