[A version of this
article was first published in Catalonia
Today, Sept. 2013.]
This month thousands
of parents across Catalonia will be almost cheering with relief, but
most teachers will be feeling a mixture of dread and anticipation.
The long summer break is now over and a new school year is beginning
again, but what is education here all about?
As both
a former secondary-school teacher and parent of a now 12 year-old
boy, I think the system of education here has a number of very good
points in its favour. Strangely though, these do not relate so much
to the strictly academic side of schooling, but are more about the
socialising of children and the habits of learning they generally
acquire very well.
What
strikes me most is how uplifting it is to to see
older kids caring for younger ones and treating
them well, and the fact that this is done naturally and informally
(without any prefects, head boys or head girls -who usually do the
opposite anyway.) While there is some bullying in schools here, the
amount and severity of it is in real contrast to what I have often
witnessed and had to deal with personally in Australia or the UK.
Another
aspect of children's school life that provides emotional benefits for
them is that their daily routine is structured in a predictable
rhythm and there is typically little change among teaching staff.
This means that in many public and semi-private concertada
schools the kids know who will teach them in the
following year and this is understood by the whole school community.
This is just one way that students feel so secure at school here.
As
I found when doing research for my book, “The Re-Made Parent,”
surveys of mothers and fathers here have shown that a large majority
of them feel that they are “welcome at school and that it is easy
to contact the teachers...who are polite and respectful.” Equally,
the food served to children at lunchtime is largely well-balanced in
quality and variety, reflecting the outlook on good nutrition here,
which is again not often the case in too many other nations.
In
short, Catalonias
schools play a crucial part in
creating young people who in wider society are confident,
well-behaved and usually polite, even if they are sometimes as loud
as those from any other country. So, while the overall picture of
schooling in Catalonia is a good one in some important areas, there
are some points where it does not do so well.
A basic
fact about education here is that it is both ccompulsory
and free until the end of the fourth year
of secondary school [ESO]
and optional (but still free) for a further two years of
Baccalaureate
courses, or where 16 year old
students can instead enter into a vocational “world of work”
stream.
This
means that, as with other European systems, parents and their kids
are here being forced into deciding the future job paths they are
obliged to take at a relatively very young age. I don't believe that
there is enough maturity or self-knowledge in many15 year-old boys or
girls to make such important judgements.
Also,
as with most country's mainstream school systems, there is a very
strong emphasis on exams being the best (and often only) way to
determine a student's knowledge and understanding of topics. Here,
the pressure of testing begins early in primary school and it goes
along with large amounts of daily and weekly homework tasks in the
“key” subjects.
Too
often, these outside school “duties” are merely a repetition of
classroom work and not an extension of learning or a development of
learning. Teachers and students both know that homework tasks are
typically meaningless but are compelled to follow this practise - big
in quantity, rather than quality.
As
well as this, old-fashioned teaching methods still largely dominate
classroom activities. Rote-learning is still very common (though it
is surely quite a useful skill in memory-development) and teacher
'chalk and talk' continues to take up the majority of time in most
subjects.
I
believe that teachers here are probably more friendly and personable
with their students than in Japan for example, but too many precious
hours are wasted every month when classes are very slow to start and
classes are regularly left without the teacher actually present. This
does only partly explain why secondary schools in general have a very
poor academic record. 30 % of teenagers leave education with no
qualifications at all. Other factors can include a high level of
cheating in tests, sometimes accepted by teachers, student
dis-engagement with the content and recently, rising class sizes
(which leads to less individual teacher help for students, overall.)
However,
competition to get into university is still a particularly strong
feature of education here. This is one reason why after-school
classes at logopèdias and
academias are
so popular, especially with Maths and English, but Catalan and
Castellano are also standard subjects for further work.And it is here
in the realm of languages where Catalonia is noteworthy.
Any
article on education here cannot ignore the controversial (and at
times emotive) question of Catalan in Catalonia's
schools. By law, Catalan “will normally be used except in the study
of other languages.” But when students have finished their
compulsory education they are supposed to“know the two official
languages and have a good knowledge of at least one foreign language”
(in practise, this being usually English.)
Today,
Catalonia faces the bizarre situation that the use of it's language
in schools is under challenge from the current conservative Spanish
national government. Change here is unlikely but some things will
continue to alter. There has been a huge rise in the number of
immigrant students since 1991, when it was less than 1%. Now kids
from immigrant families are more than 15% of the population
(including my own son!)
In
the future, the challenges thrown up by “the crisis” (which I
explore elsewhere in this month's magazine) will put new stresses on
an education system that is both doing well, and not so well, by
different measures.
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