The Eighth Trumpet

Koranic Learning

An academic detour on this week's Camino a Ítaca and a look at Spain's uncertain Back-to-school week. With COVID contagion rates soaring above the WHO recommended levels, it's more than likely only a matter of time before classes move online. If the recommended distance wasn't enough to kill cooperative learning, online classes will only finish off what little there was. Read the English below or click over to the original in El Hoy. Tambien se puede ver el original en castellano abajo en PDF.

You can hear it from afar as it echoes across the country, that annoying metallic shriek of desks being dragged across classroom floors. With just days before our kids go back to school, directives have finally been issued by suntanned ministers and classrooms across Spain are having to be rethought in creative attempts to establish the recommended distance between desks. But if you listen more closely, apart from this irritating screech, you can also hear another more depressing sound.

You can just barely make it out underneath all of the media noise debating the issues that dominate the conversation. Questions like whether cameras should be installed in classrooms, how many fancy, state-of-the-art tablets we need or just how big your bubble can get if you include afterschool activities. Listen carefully though, just beyond the white noise and you’ll hear the mournful death rattle of the incipient gains that modern cooperative teaching methodologies have made in classrooms across the region.

Across Extremadura, a small but ambitious group of teachers have been casting off the chains of a lifelong legacy of memorize and puke education. In doing so, they have battled against the koranic learning that has dogged them since their own school years. A fight that culminates in the pinnacle expression of medieval learning and the epitome of uselessness: the oposicion (public exams to become a civil servant) process that granted them their post.

Indeed, this scrapping isn’t ubiquitous. In fact, think back to when you picked up your children’s books back in May. More likely than not, the classroom already foreshadowed the supposed new normal. Do you recall single file rows, where the closest possible interaction with peers is an in-depth study of the back of their classmate’s head? Did the books you picked up have blank pages at the end of each unit? Had the ‘messy’ project work been conveniently skipped over in the frantic race to ‘cover’ the enormous content of the curriculum? More is better, right?

This is because there is nothing new about it. Spanish education laws may sound modern and cutting edge on paper but the reality in the classroom is invariably completely different. Each successive overhaul tends (7 or 8 since the return to democracy?) to highlight an emphasis on competences, group work and community learning, but unfortunately these are not always reflected in practice. Teachers do what they have seen.

Many still see children as finite vessels that are to be filled with information rather than allowing them to be active participants in their learning. Information that isn’t manipulated or interpreted just gets vomited back onto an exam, only to be quickly forgotten. Even if the curriculum does encourage change, the administrative nature of inspectors and misnomered Heads of Studies means they have little influence in regards to what happens behind the closed doors of each Taifa.

The non-stop pandemic drone has deafened us to all else. The enormous health challenge it presents is obviously a huge concern but a return to the chalk and talk class or its online equivalent sets off alarm bells that are equally concerning. Learning is social, we learn from each other and working together is the only way to defeat this. Our kids need to learn these skills now in order to overcome the next Apocalypse.