Pomp Without the Glory

In this week's Camino a Ítaca we travel to the British Iles to see what we can learn from recent events there. Click over to read the original Spanish version in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF abajo) 

The island nation that gifted the world things like trains, the internet, parliamentary democracy and David Attenborough has fallen on hard times. Like a once respected member of society who unfortunately gets hooked on heroin, it is now a mere shadow of its former self. Come to think of it, when was the last time anyone looked to the United Kingdom as some sort of example to follow?

The once proud empire’s slow decline into irrelevance had been going on for so long that no one really noticed that it was completely under water until it was far too late. The UK public spent so much time watching endless reruns of their victories in the great wars, that they forgot to acknowledge that it was in fact their bastard son that saved them from their German nemesis: twice. Like some sort of bankrupt aristocrat, it had been living and borrowing on a reputation that had long ago cashed its last good check. The country that gave the world Cheddar cheese and the Beatles, now flogs Coldplay and anodyne marmalade sandwiches.

This death foretold exponentially picked up speed when a group of selfish narcissists handed Germany the victory it once sought without even having to lift a finger, let alone firing a shot. This cabal of greedy Oxford-educated sociopaths somehow duped the nation into swallowing the blue pill of neoliberal fiction that saw them voluntarily leave the world’s largest trading block. A monumental blunder taken under the aegis it would somehow be good for the general public, rather than simply benefiting a small group of rich businessmen who were merely looking to get rid of inconvenient EU regulations.

What did the British public end up with? First, a cheap Trump impersonator who never learned how to use a comb. nor follow his own pandemic laws. An incorrigible shyster who reveled in repealing EU environmental regulations that allowed raw sewage to be dumped onto beaches around the country. Thus, making the metaphor literal, giving industry the right to shit on its citizens.

Then came his replacement, Truss the brief (en un tris Truss). A clueless fake whose first bold move was to reduce taxes on the rich to such an extent that even the market couldn’t accept the yawning hole this would leave in the country’s budget.

The result? The pound went into a free fall and the economy almost collapsed.

But if you look closer, perhaps this nearly failed state can offer us some insight. If there is something that you can learn from a bad example, it is what not to do.

The Trump imitators here in Spain offer the same snake oil. They may know how to comb their hair, but the siren song coming out of the Puerta del Sol of lowering taxes only serves to make the rich richer while helping to speed the looming death of the welfare state. Their proposed tax cuts would actually help them afford more private healthcare coverage, while at the same time making your wait for a simple operation longer and longer.

The British have offered valuable lessons before and they still can. We simply need to be discerning enough to learn from them.

LOL Law

LOL Law

In today's Camino a Ítaca we take a look at the new education law and the (not) changes that have been introduced. Click over to read the original in Spanish published in el HOY or read the English version below. (PDF abajo) 

It’s been just over a month now since that typically Spanish matinal sound of backpacks rolling over sidewalk tiles returned to the soundscape of our cities. Have those of you with school aged children noticed a dramatic change?

Have those once burdensome backpacks filled with books been reduced to bring back and forth material for the different projects your kids are working on? Have you noticed an increased bounce in their step and willingness to go to school each day, glad that they no longer have to mindlessly copy out enunciados (instructions from their coursebooks) and complete worksheet after worksheet?

Have you witnessed a marked reduction in exams and that they do have no longer solely consist of regurgitating material that they have memorized, only to forget the next day? Have you noticed that their exams no longer are focused on mistakes, but rather concentrate on their achievements, however small they may be? Have you seen the shift away from a strictly quantitative evaluation, where the important thing was the final numerical result, to a more complete and qualitative evaluation, in which the objective is not only the numerical value, but the global learning obtained?

Have you been surprised at a new focus on self-improvement? One which allows students to make mistakes and learn from them, understanding that it is not necessarily a bad thing to make mistakes and that learning from mistakes is an essential step towards improvement.

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Remember the doom and gloom that was being forecast during the lead up to the change in the education law, the umpteenth reform since the return to democracy? Remember the fearmongering that this emphasis on competence-based education was going to mean that our kids would no longer know the names of the principal rivers in the country and never learn to count to ten?

Well, they needn’t have fretted so, because the law may have changed but age-old practices haven’t. It’s a peculiar trait here in Spain that I have always found curious. This quixotic practice of creating laws that look wonderful on paper, yet that no one has any real intention of complying with. The successive education laws are a perfect example. On paper Spain can boast one of the most modern, progessive, up-to-date education laws in the world. Yet in many classrooms children are still lining up to the teacher’s desk to get their copia (where they literally copy out instructions from coursebooks) corrected and learning that the world was created in seven days.

Have you ever seen your child come home with a purely competence based final assessment? It could be argued that it is still too early for the new law to be implemented, but key competences have been explicit in Spanish education laws since 2006 and were understood as capacities in the 90s. Yet why haven’t these changes taken place? It’s because the teachers themselves had to get their position via an equally atavistic process.

The system of oposciones are the antithesis of learning and competence based education. Until there is real and profound change in the way that teachers are chosen and then managed, observed and continuously trained, the laws can be changed ten times more but kids will still be suffering the copia. 

The Neofascist Boogie

Zorba dancing the Sirtaki

In this week's Camino a Ítaca we take a look at the concerning trend to the right across the old continent. Click over to read the original in Spanish in el HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF abajo)

Europe, land of traditional dances where ballet was born and from whence the waltz went global. Here in Spain, Flamenco may be better known outside the peninsula, but that doesn’t mean that the Jota is any less important. The Irish come to Santa Maria every year for the Caceres Irish Fleadh to dance the Jig and in Greece the Sirtaki became famous thanks to Zorba. We’ve seen Ukrainians jump in the air and spread out their legs between Russian missile strikes when dancing the Hopak and the chorus girls in France became famous the world over for dancing the Can-Can.

Over in Italy they have been renowned for the Tarantella for thousands of years, but this past weekend they started dancing a new dance, one that hadn’t been widely seen in the Via Apia since the thirties. A dance that is gaining acceptance and popularity across the world and has spread like a virus from country to country in Europe. Hungary, Poland, Sweden and now Italy have joined a growing number of countries that have willfully taken a hard goosestep to the right.

Major newspapers across the continent have been tepidly wringing their hands, doubting whether or not to call Meloni’s overwhelming electoral victory a win for the Far Right. Yet her party’s roots can clearly be traced back to the Italian Social Movement which was founded in the aftermath of World War II by fascist politicians who had played a significant role in the Republic of Salò, the pro-Nazi puppet regime that governed the northern half of Italy after the Allies invaded Sicily in 1943.

She is also no stranger to Spain either. She only just recently gave a speech at a Vox rally in Murcia that was shreikingly Wagnerian in tone, rolling out musty, old shibboleths and ticking off every box of Umberto Ecco’s fascism checklist. Her heremoteca is lengthy enough to know just what tune she dances to. As they say, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then… it probably is a duck.

But rather than a victory for the extreme right, this is yet another catastrophic loss for the increasingly woke-infatuated left. 25% of the less than 70% of the Italians who actually bothered to cast their vote, voted for someone that they know deep down has absolutely no interest in their wellbeing.

This wasn’t a vote for Il Duce apologists but rather a repudiation of a left that has given up fighting for its traditional causes. A left that ignores more than 30,000 signatures against the proposed mine in Caceres, a left that refuses to investigate the misdeeds of Iberdrola in Monfragüe and a left that siphons off patients to private clinics due to underfunded public healthcare services. This is an indictment against a left that has taken up marginal causes as their main platform and who still believe that Tony Blair’s Third Way will magically make multinational companies behave ethically.

If the left means to stop this slippery slide into the blackness of the thirties, they have to demand better, demand more, demand support for the middle and not only the fringes. If they don’t, what they end up demanding is less: less public services, less equality and less rights.