Cheating Fate

Sure! Everybody has had that inspiring teacher who succeeded in engaging our minds into learning.  I met mine during my university years.  Meanwhile, I spent my Spanish mandatory schooling years mostly in a cloud of ceaseless boredom, listening to teachers marching page by page through the textbooks and delivering the same lines in a pristine exercise of regurgitation.  The scheduled lecture was inevitably met with stupor.  500 plus students blending with the equipment, we would inadvertently become one with the sparingly furnished post-Franco era building.  Repressing any spontaneous act of creativity and disobedience would become our default modus operandi; we complied and we obeyed.  We raised from our chairs whenever an adult entered the classroom and chanted "Buenos días, señor maestro". There was teaching, but the kind which flourishes in a culture of compliance.  After all, the country was striving to puzzle together years of repression and the hope for a better future by cloaking old stablished ideologies.  Those are today´s wore out cloaks revealing a Felipe IV without clothes -a topic for another time.

I remember memorizing all those lessons filled with dates, names, theorems, theories, and routine algorithms; most of them now forgotten.  The job of a teacher should never resemble Machado’s Memories from Childhood: Una tarde parda y fría de invierno. Los colegiales estudian. Monotonía de la lluvia en los cristales (it was a cold and overcast winter afternoon. The children are studying. Monotony of rain drops on the window glass panels).  It is time which has taught us the deeply rooted effects that a yrs dictatorship has on a country’s social structures, on its culture, on its people.  Education during the 70s and great part of the 80s still endured the trademarks of its ruthless dictator: a perpetual state of “dormantness” by the surgical extirpation of anything resembling dissidence, of anything intellectually and religiously deviant to the dictator’s bereft standards. 

In fact, deviation from the norm continued to be an alien concept during the first part of the 80s.  My fourth grade teacher, for example,  viewed those who did not fit the stereotype as gypsies and thugs, all those “sort of low income people” and by this, he meant that we were intellectually, culturally, and even morally inferior.  As if somehow, those from the low economic income bracket were endowed with a genetic pool that incapacitated them for academia.  What was a group of thirty 10-year olds to do but to concede?  If culture has ever framed education, this picture never managed to outshine its frame.  The result: this perpetual strife of reconciling competing worldviews, of reaching a mutual understanding while accepting and maintaining cultural differences.

Note the use of the masculine noun -alumno-

even when the student, as in this case, was a female.

So, I managed to get high grades all through high school.  However, what those scores meant is still up for debate. I memorized with ease 40 pages full of dictation in less than two lunches and one dinner.  I believe we took pride of good grades out of a hyped sense of competition.  Getting an A involved the mimicry of spewing up information not necessarily learnt.  Critical thinking and higher order thinking skills were a rare fictional land.   Our confidence as students came from knowing we escaped the stigmatization of failing on a test; that, despite the naysayers, we could cheat fate.   

This is in a nutshell how I remember my formative years.  Yes, we had moved from parochial to public schooling.  However, the effects of the accumulated detritus of 40 years of dictatorship had as a byproduct the General Law of Education passed in 1970 (Franco died in 1975).  The main characteristic of the law was the pervasive homogenization impetus of the country’s darkest times.  We all were made to fit a norm; the exceptions had already fled the country or were consequently silenced.   It was not until 1990’s education reform that the notion of school integration expressly appeared in legal documents.  Still, the first honest attempt to put integration at the forefront of educational practice was not until 2006 with the enacting of the Organic Law of Education.  During the 70s and well into the 80s, my formative years, any student perceived as different did not belong within the general student population.  One wonders how many children of humble or diverse backgrounds were wrongly labeled, misplaced, and segregated.  In the US we have called this phenomena institutional segregation; better yet, pervasive institutional segregation.

I wonder how much time is needed to change the ideological paradigm of a country after such extraneous inhumane periods, especially when professional educators and legislators neglected to inform, failing to uncover -scratch that- covering the old power and privilege dynamics, failing to  educate the new generations about our infamous past.  When this happens and an individual ideology prevails over the educational common interest, progress is halted.  To fill in the void, the populace enjoyed bullfighting and Catholic Sunday mass. The Civil war and Franco’s dictatorship were the taboos of my formative years.  The cloaks are coming out today and we assist to a resurgence of neo-fascist ideals form a Spanish population that have barely finished their compulsory education.  The educational outcomes become dreadful when latent ideologies and educational practices do not belong to the present age.

Legislators have passed a total of six education reforms since 1970 (LGE, 1970; LOGSE, 1990; LOPEG, 1995; LOCE, 2002; LOE, 2006; LOMCE, 2013).  Education is the wedge issue politicians used to impose their predominant ideology.  Teachers are caught in the middle of this pendulum-like ideological motion.  The strike is about to recede back to Machado’s Memories of Childhood.  It is a shift we, as a society of multiple cultures, languages, and people cannot afford, morally and economically.  We must cheat fate.