Brigadoon or the Melancholy of Catalan Education

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Xavier Massó

The “Great Leap Forward” was a process of economic and social reform, associated with the Cultural Revolution, implemented in the People’s Republic of China from the 1960s onwards. The aim was to impose industrialisation on what was then an underdeveloped, largely agrarian nation, making use of its vast human capital. A millennia-old country that had spent the last three or four centuries languishing at the back of history’s queue, yet still unable to avoid getting a few sharp jabs along the way.

The tragic and unqualified failure of these measures led, among other catastrophes, to famines that claimed the lives of at least twenty to thirty million people. In terms of education, it manifested as a crude application of Maoist jargon: teachers were, by default, suspect and discredited—tens of thousands purged; anti-intellectualism was glorified; a blanket, Procrustean egalitarianism enforced; denunciation elevated to a moral imperative; tradition blatantly rejected, and knowledge ridiculed; teaching was reduced to crude ideological slogans, with the teacher relegated to the role of indoctrinator. It’s hardly surprising it reeks of something familiar: many of our own May ’68 types, fervent admirers of the Cultural Revolution at the time, later went on to forge political careers, shedding their old dogmas in the process, and ascended to prominent positions of educational and academic responsibility within the Catalan administration—clinging to the post for life. These were raving fanatics who, if they’d ever heard of Gramsci, would have written him off as a bourgeois reactionary.

By the mid-1970s, with the death of the “Great Helmsman”—Mao Zedong—a shift occurred within the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party. Those aligned with Mao were ousted. Most were purged, and some, like his widow and leader of the “Gang of Four,” Jiang Qing, were imprisoned, judged and sentenced. The economic policies of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were officially declared failures, and a new era began—one that would lead China to its current status as an economic superpower, with educational outcomes to match.

One could certainly ask whether, despite being a colossal failure, the Great Leap Forward didn’t somehow lay the groundwork for China’s later economic and technological take-off, which has left the world gobsmacked. If we adhere to the Hegelian notion of negativity as a driving force in history, it might just be the case. In any event, let’s not forget that to set things right, the entire gang of fanatics and bloodthirsty fools who had driven the country to the brink had to be shown the door—sent packing to their homes, to labour camps, to re-education, or to prison.

We, too, had our own Great Leap Forward—an educational one—over seven lustrums ago, with the LOGSE (1990). Ours is a land perpetually eager to take a leap into the void, only to crash down hard. We had our own brand of supposedly revolutionary educational ‘culture’—charming, homemade, and equally pernicious—whose true purpose was the creation and shaping of ‘educational opinion’. Like the darkroom that projects the inverted image – Marx’s metaphor for the rise of false consciousness: ideology. Our homegrown narrative sold us a ‘wonderful’ and ‘fantastically innovative’ education system that was in fact the mirror image of the disaster unfolding. Let’s be clear: this wasn’t about nurturing judgment, but about manufacturing opinion. The pill was already prepared, and swallowing it was non-negotiable. Communion or heresy. And, naturally, with the standard carrot-and-stick approach, administered under the age-old maxim of divide et impera.

In China, now sitting at the top of global educational rankings, it took just fifteen years for people to get thoroughly fed up with charlatans and fraudsters. When they had the chance, they kicked them out and made it clear they weren’t welcome back. In Catalonia, thirty-five years after the LOGSE and nearly twenty years on from our charming LEC with its delightful decrees on school management, autonomy and staffing—boasting some of the worst educational outcomes in Spain, and a laughing stock across Europe—we still haven’t realised that we’ve been taken for a ride. Worse still, we haven’t noticed that our brains are being systematically drained. And yet, we’re still stuck with the same shameless crew calling the shots, joined by successive waves of sycophants eager to grab their slice of the pie—of course they are.

Are the PISA results a disaster? No worries! We’ll set up a commission of so-called experts who, with their boundless wisdom, will point us in the right direction. And then it turns out the commission is made up of the very same people who caused the mess in the first place! The ‘Catalan school success model’, they call it… what a cheek! I have to hand it to them, though— it takes some serious gall to say something like that and still stroll away with a straight face. And as for their clapping audience… poor souls. Best not to say any more.

Can anyone imagine the Chinese Communist Party asking the Gang of Four to assess the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? Of course not. But that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for years here in Catalonia. One could even argue that, in our case, history has completely opted out of dialectics. It’s simply come to a standstill. Poor Hegel. Or perhaps we’re trapped in a time loop, much like the film Brigadoon (V. Minnelli, 1954), the Scottish village that only reappeared once every hundred years, with its inhabitants living outside of time, outside of history. And with the “elites” forbidding the villagers from peering out, just in case they liked what they saw and decided to leave. Maybe that’s the truth of it—maybe, mentally, we’re living in a new Brigadoon.

And just like in Brigadoon, in our case too, we have self-righteous, fearful elites, full of their own importance and clinging to their perks and cosy little deals, who, being the only ones permitted a glimpse of the outside world, are pulling the wool over our eyes, lest they lose their exclusive hold on the secret and watch the whole thing crumble, along with their comfy little racket. To be fair, they’ve succeeded in one respect: we now have our very own, clearly distinct educational model—so disastrously bad that no one in their right mind would ever dream of copying it. They can sleep easy. All they need to do is stay alert once every hundred years, just in case the people start feeling a bit nostalgic for rejoining history.

Perhaps it’s time we took a leaf out of the Chinese playbook: they realised that their Great Leap Forward had been a leap into the void—or into sheer oblivion—and they corrected course. That, or we resign ourselves to life in Brigadoon. But let’s not forget García Márquez’s chilling warning at the close of his most famous novel: “Races condemned to one hundred years of solitude do not have a second opportunity on earth”.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

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