Bob Cant
The school is a ruin now but when it opened in 1932 it was a symbol of the optimism of the early days of Spain’s Republican government. A simple single-storey building with a communal classroom to one side of a central arch and the school teacher’s house to the other side of the arch, it was a source of hope for the local population who struggled to make a living as peasants and goat-herds.
The people who sent their children to this school in Balonga saw a chance for the next generation to escape the poverty and servitude that marked their own lives. Education was valued as never before and the pupils walked miles every day for the chance to learn.
This was more than an experiment for the people of one locality in the region of Murcia. It was a national initiative that the Ministry of Public Education and Fine Arts was promoting all over Spain. The fact that centre-left parties had succeeded in lifting the dead hand of the monarchy from off the shoulders of the people of Spain had made them feel more confident about their ability to weaken the dominance of other institutions in the country.
They pursued a model of education developed by the socialist intellectual, Francisco Giner de los Rios; it was based on rational thought, secular in its values and equally accessible for both genders. Not only did they want to open up educational opportunities for more young people, they also wanted them to be able to study away from the influences of an authoritarian church.
Around the same time, La Barraca, the theatre company set up by Federico Garcia Lorca, was touring the poorest parts of rural Spain taking theatrical classics by the likes of Calderon de la Barca and Lope de Vega to audiences that had never previously seen a play. The republican government had begun an ambitious experiment to enable Spaniards to develop their intellectual and imaginative potential. It was a project so ambitious that other people were bound to want to suppress it.
In 1939, after a civil war that left half a million dead and drove a similar number into exile, the armies of General Franco, supported by the aristocracy and prelates of the church, succeeded in destroying the republic itself. Schools in rural Murcia like the one I visited remained in place but they were no more than outposts of a dictatorial regime. Although the war ended formally in 1939, the military government pursued its enemies for the next 20 years; teachers who were thought to have encouraged independent thought were among those who were hunted down and targeted for extermination.
After the death of Franco in the late 70s, education became a prominent feature of the transition to democracy. While there was no longer the level of expectation that had been attached to schools in the early 30s, free education was taken for granted as part of the new settlement. While the richest sections of society preferred to have their children educated privately by the likes of the Jesuits, vast sums of taxpayers’ money were invested to ensure that no-one was excluded from education for financial reasons.
And then there was the economic crisis. Corrupt politicians, greedy bankers and property developers (sometimes the same individuals took on all three roles) were clearly at fault but none of them has been held to account for their behaviour. Among the people who have been most severely punished for this collapse are young people who might have imagined that their education could have paved a way out of the crisis for their country.
A complex system of funding that gives different levels of responsibility to the central government and the regional governments has, in recent months, meant that education seems to have been under attack from every direction. Last winter, school students in Valencia region came out on strike because there was no funding to pay for the heating in their school buildings; class sizes, nationally, have been increased from 25 to 30 in primary schools and from 30 to 36 in secondary schools; teachers’ salaries have been cut but they are required to work for longer hours; students who take on part-time work to help pay for their materials find that the level of their wages has fallen.
The most mean-spirited example of the cutback mentality comes from Madrid region. The government there abolished free school meals for children from poor families; but these fiscally conscious converts went the extra mile and charged each child with a packed lunch a daily fee of three euros for the privilege of placing their tupperware boxes on tables owned by the regional government.
Jose Ignacio Wert, the minister of education, is cutting billions of euros from the educational budget with what can be described as a scatter gun approach; he has already removed citizenship from the curriculum and only last week he announced, without any consultation, that he would end the teaching of classics in state funded schools; which subject will he decide to aim for next? He seems to have some problems with understanding history – so, teachers in that discipline are rightly worried. His reduction in the size of student bursaries is very reminiscent of the abolition of the educational maintenance allowance by our own right-wing government.
Students are alarmed that all these austerity measures are likely to result in the destruction of public education; they are particularly concerned that students from non-rich backgrounds will be priced out of higher education. A successful three-day strike was called across Spain recently by the national students’ union. Unusually, it was supported by the largest parents’ organisation and many of their members took part in the protest. The stakes are high for the future of education and the young people who should be benefitting from it.
These education cuts are no laughing matter; but there is a joke going around which captures perfectly the mixture of bitterness and defiance felt by many people about their rulers’ contemptuous attitude towards public education and the historical parallels which it evokes.
Concha
Have you heard that the minister of education is turning back the clocks this year?
Ramon
But the clocks always go back an hour at the end of October. What’s it got to do with the minister of education?
Concha
This year he’s turning the clocks back to 1939.
Crisis in Spain: part 2 will appear on Thursday
Bob Cant is a writer who travels frequently to Spain
website design by Big Blue Dogwebsite development by NSD Web