In this week's Camino a Ítaca we return to the trail of education and the challenges the kids face here in Extremadura, Spain. A place where 'no pain, no gain' is the way forward in learning. You can click over and read the original published in Spanish or read the English version below. (PDF en Castellano abajo)
I grew up in a staunchly monolingual part of a country
that is officially bilingual. Even though I’m from a lost city out on the Canadian prairies, 3,000 kilometers
from French-speaking Quebec, every single package has to be in both languages. With
this in mind, my mother sent my brother and I to one of the public immersion
schools in the city where we spent our mornings enveloped in the language of
Voltaire while the world the surrounded the school sounded more like Margaret Atwood.
I remember opening the doors to the school and being shifted into an alternative reality. A world that contrasted sharply from
the generalized prudish austerity of the Canadian prairies. It was a place
where smartly dressed teachers from distant Montreal and even further off
Bordeaux melded methodologies from both sides of the Atlantic.
I can’t help but compare my childhood commute to school with the
lovely walk I have with my kids every morning here in Caceres, Spain. Here we walk past renaissance
palaces to the soundscape of storks or swifts, depending on the season. A sharp
contrast from my memories of shoveling half a meter of snow in minus thirty
weather just to get to the sidewalk.
The
contrasts don’t end there though. Schooling is quite different here, even if
the education laws are similar, at least on paper. I remember having exams
every semester or so when I was in school, but here one of my daughters sometimes has two, three and
even four a week. Being from a different culture, I began asking what other
parents thought and was alarmed at what I heard. While most seemed to agree
that this incessant testing was excessive, some commented on the fact that the
children might as well get used to it now, because as they advanced through the
system things would only get worse. Powerful words like horrendous, terrible and
suffering resounded and were some of the most common that I heard as we talking about this. Keep in mind, all of this
when referring to the education of our children. I then became frightened for a
moment. Did so many share the idea that children were meant to suffer? Was
there some sort of psychopathic COVID side effect running rampant in society?
Was there really a widespread desire to see kids suffer?
I then thought about it further and then realized that there actually might be some truth in what they were saying. In a region where around 30% (low-balling) will face a public exam that will determine their future, being good at taking exams isn’t just another life skill, it is the life skill. Forget actual learning, disregard interiorizing information and revision and don’t even consider learning by doing. The game here is to memorize, spit and forget. That’s how you get ahead and the sooner you learn how, the better. The platitudes you hear about the need to 'make an effort' really has nothing to do with actual learning and in fact translates into a view that one needs to suffer in order to learn. The prevailing concept of education is that it equates with suffering and penance. The alarm I heard wasn’t really a question of sadism, but actually a grumble of discontent and a rattle of resignation and surrender.
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