A little common sense

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Andreu Navarra

I’m having a coffee with two friends who both teach at the same school. They begin telling me things that gave me goosebumps—issues that clearly go beyond the specific neighbourhood where they work. I ask them about Aules d’Acollida¹, as I’m gathering information on recent budget cuts and closures of educational lines in our public education system. One of them, Anna (not her real name), tells me that her school really needs three Aules d’Acollida, not just one. She argues that newly arrived pupils should be able to spend a full academic year in language immersion. The proposal is gaining traction and has made its way into the minds of policymakers—but they hesitate. Some fear such a move would be “discriminatory”.

Then Emma speaks (also a pseudonym). She believes that the notion of inclusion in Catalonia is largely a deception—a façade. Children arriving in Years One or Two of primary school are deemed too young to qualify for a Aula d’Acollida. So, what are language immersion programmes? A form of “discrimination” or a basic right? And what if this thing we’re calling “inclusion” is really just exclusion—an abdication of responsibility, a lack of realism, political will, and care? Leaving young children to sit in classrooms for years, unable to understand or engage with anything—what impact must that have?

This is real. It’s not an episode of some Netflix series set in a far-off land. Are we not violating the rights of these children by hiding behind progressive-sounding labels? Might extreme inclusion have more to do with austerity measures and chronic underinvestment than with any genuine commitment to democratic or progressive values? Why is it that we seem to include less the more “inclusive” we claim to be? Is it too much to ask that we reflect on this?

But worse is yet to come. These children—by the time they reach Year Three—are technically entitled to access a Aula d’Acollida. But by then, they’ve already been enrolled in the Catalan school system for two years, and so no longer qualify. The result? They don’t speak a word of Catalan. Anna and Emma are expected to pass students in Catalan year after year—students who have never once spoken the language, and who sit Catalan exams but answer in Spanish. By Year 10, the situation borders on the absurd: the law requires that these students be given a certificate that formally entails a C1 level of Catalan. Pupils who have spent ten years in Catalonia’s schools without ever reading or speaking a single sentence in Catalan are graduating with a C1. This is happening.

And yet, in a system where schools no longer know what they’re doing, what they’re meant to be doing, or what they ought to be planning, and where teaching actual curriculum content—whether in Catalan, Spanish, English, Maths or Science—has come to be seen as some sort of heresy, it’s hardly surprising. What is harder to accept is that no one seems willing to stop it. No one is doing their job. And so, the general absurdity of the educational system continues.

Across much of Catalonia, Aules d’Acollida are being closed. Since the LOMLOE (Spain’s new education law) asserts that the Universal Design for Learning (DUA) guarantees universal access to Basic Competences, the authorities now have their excuse to make budget cuts. In practice, the outcomes are often so disastrous that Aules d’Acollida need to be reopened just months later—just as special schools will have to be reopened at the request of affected families. We must begin to invest in genuinely inclusive public services if we are to avoid falling into a dictatorship of inequality like that of the United States. Could that really happen?

Anna and Emma keep sharing stories. Of former students, for example, who—without any qualification of real value—end up selling drugs on street corners. And I recall the words of a university speaker, a secondary school history teacher, who recently told us about the fury he feels every time he learns that one of his former pupils has ended up in prison.

We continue to create ghettos. And what the anti-segregation regulations are doing, in practice, is consolidating geographic segregation in our cities. A colleague from the Natural Sciences department once explained in class that human beings are mammals. Some Muslim students lodged a complaint with the school management, accusing her of anti-Islamic teaching. And (listen to this) the school reprimanded the teacher. Are we no longer free to teach science in our classrooms without facing unacceptable pressure? Have we all gone mad?

That speaker was right: we are failing as a society. We are complicit in the bureaucracy of the administration, and we are not demanding the levels of public investment required. It seems to me that many school management teams have lost all sense of direction—they no longer know what a school is or what it’s for. They’ve allowed themselves to be lulled into a comfortable, cynical nihilism. They have taken up residence in fantasy, while continuing to generously fund the propaganda machinery that keeps fuelling division with its hollow, hypocritical rhetoric.

I finish my coffee, we pay, and I head home feeling dejected. I sit down and begin writing this article. I don’t want to end up living in an electoral autocracy like Hungary or Russia. I’d like to see a rational, materialist Left break free from its sectarian identity politics and focus instead on building robust, far-reaching public services for all families. This is achievable—if we stop diverting millions to destructive lobbies and mandarins. But these lobbies have also penetrated the Left, with their bribes, fantasies, and deception.

Anna and Emma are both part of grassroots, assembly-based leftist movements. I have never seen either of them as extremists—let alone racists or supremacists. If anything, quite the opposite. They are rooted in their local communities and committed to bringing real emancipatory ideals into their daily work. They tell me they fear that, in the face of public negligence surrounding us, people will start voting for the far right, as has already happened in France, Sweden and Austria—but here with an added risk: the welfare state in Spain was always a pale shadow of what those countries once had. We may end up paying dearly for official complacency—in the form of eruptions of racism and intercommunal hatred.

No one seems willing to restore the authority of Enlightenment democracy, built on the ideal of equality. Somewhere between unconscious, well-meaning extremism (a kind of nihilism) and supremacist revenge, surely there must be space to forge a path of responsibility. A space where rights, duties, and secular norms of coexistence are not mistaken for “fascist impositions”. Because if we don’t act soon, the real fascists will have their moment. They will be the ones to finally destroy democratic education—and to start bellowing their battle cries: “Down with Intelligence!”

I can no longer find any trace of the dynamic, clear-headed Catalonia we once knew. Anna and Emma are fighting their battles alone. Who is helping them? Among our lawmakers, there is too much rigidity, too much fear, and far too much classism.

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¹ A kind of Welcome Class. A separate classroom where newly arrived pupils who do not yet speak the local language spend a period of time before joining the mainstream class.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons