Writing in the local paper. Local Issues with a global take. I never translate literally and the editor trims at will to make it fit. Here's my version, then theirs.
After having lived here for more than a decade, I still catch myself looking up in wonder as the last rays of the setting sun hit the Torre de la Yerba in the Plaza. The layers of history present as I walk under the Arco de la Estrella send my imagination reeling only to suddenly be brought back to the present when I see groups of tourists taking selfies under it. That mix of tradition, history and modernity, that ability to meld the past with the present is one of this region’s biggest resources. What I can’t understand though is when some things remain firmly mired in the past, frozen in time like the face of the Amazona that cries out from the facade of the Obispado.These past weeks, thousands of brave opositores have been struggling through an exam process that perfectly fits in with the 16th century palaces that populate our old town. A medieval system that selects the teachers that will then guide our youth through this new age. I can easily envision a table of cloaked monks sitting in Santa Maria while opositores recite what they have memorized without having to internalize nor analyze the content, just as today’s opositores are asked to do. It’s a system so deeply engrained in Spanish culture that it’s the one issue that is never questioned when the prickly topic of bettering the Spanish education system arises. A curriculum more innovative than those of Finland or Canada could be developed, where investigation and project based learning are the pilars but if the very teachers are still koranically memorizing enormous quantities of what will amount to be useless information in order to get the job, what can be expected of them when they actually reach the classroom? The cognitive dissonance between how they are chosen and how teaching is in this new century is a gulf too wide to bridge.
The past and knowledge of it is important but what is crucial is to know when it is time to move on and adopt new ways of thinking before we truly get left behind. It’s like those warts stuck to the Almohad wall that I see as I walk towards the old town, if they have to go, they have to go.
