Anaïs Nin started her famous diary in Barcelona?

 

"In Barcelona I didn't have the impression that the absence of my father was definitive. I thought it could come at any moment. We saw his family, his parents, his grandmother...It was his homeland...".

A blog (in Catalan) on the childhood of the great writer in Barcelona.

"A cursed woman:" Jordi Corominas i Julián: Clotilde Cerdà en Mujeres Malditas

Jordi Corominas i Julián: Clotilde Cerdà en Mujeres Malditas: "A  biography of Clotilde Cerdà, multifaceted and [relatively] unknown." You can listen to it at the link above.

"Clotilde Cerdà (1861-1926) was a child prodigy, world-famous harpist, anti-slavery activist and defender of women's rights. Everything indicates that the author of the "Ensanche", Ildefons Cerdà, was not her biological father."

"iSpy with my little eye: Apple’s u-turn on privacy sets a precedent and threatens everyone’s security"

Image credit: Electronic Frontier Foundation (CC BY 3.0 US)

"Apple has just announced significant changes to their privacy settings for messaging and cloud services: first, it will scan all images sent by child accounts; second, it will scan all photos as they are being uploaded to iCloud. 

With these changes, Apple is threatening everyone’s privacy, security and confidentiality...

EDRi [[European Digital Rights] and other civil society groups have been warning of the risks of these proposed technological ‘solutions’. 

Despite the laudable goal to protect children, these changes in fact introduce measures that make everyone less safe by creating a ‘backdoor’ into our private lives. 

With Apple blessing these privacy-invasive technologies and the adoption of the recent interim CSAM legislation, we are deeply concerned that these practices will be normalised and promoted further by other companies and by policy-makers. We call on Apple to abandon these proposed changes and to step up against corporate and government surveillance."

Read more here.

"The quiet one" -- From an article I wrote for Catalonia Today magazine

[Photo: Lluís Serrat.]

There he is. Sitting along the side of the class, with his head down. He could be a child or an adult -- and certainly female too -- but today at least this introvert has very little to say for himself.   

Familiar to most of us who spend any time in group situations at work or in a social setting, the introvert is not shy by definition. 

According to North American author (and self-acknowledged introvert) Susan Cain, shyness is actually about fear of being judged by others.

In fact, she argues, it’s just that “introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments.” Extroverts -- their opposites -- are people who simply function better with a high level of social stimulation.

The wider point that Cain makes in her book on the subject is she believes that a bias has crept into “our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces. They are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation. And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place.”

Myself, as someone who does not fit neatly into either category of the out-going chatterbox or the silent internal type (but rather seem to flit between the two depending on the moment) I confess to having largely failed in my attempts to run a fully inclusive classroom. 

When I was a secondary teacher I tried to democratically involve all of my students in being vocal but (like many educators) I was unaware of how best to do this or that some teenagers just do not want to speak if it can be avoided.

Teaching adults over the last few years I’ve learned that the prevailing culture in this part of the world too is clearly in favour of extroverts. I have even taught in companies where they believe that they do not have any introverts working alongside them as their colleagues. 

In the endless rounds of group meetings and chatty open plan offices introverts often fade into the background. It is as if being introverted is a mark of shame and sets someone apart as “not a team player.”  

But there is no good reason for this to be the case. 

As Susan Cain discovered, “when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely [ignored] for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be very careful...and when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them.” 

She gives the examples of Charles Darwin, Steve Jobs and genius children’s author Dr Seuss.

Of course, extroverts can and do lead us the wrong way though. 

Cain notes that “groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”

For some reason, the name Donald Trump immediately comes to mind.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, June 2017.]

"Yemen: The 9-year-old war-zone school teacher"

 The most moving 90 seconds of TV I've seen in a long time.

"In the city of Taiz, Yemen, hundreds of children arrive for lessons each day in the ruins of a school near to front-line fighting between the government and Houthi rebels.

Ahmed, a nine-year-old boy who has been blind since birth, steps in to take classes when the teachers can't make it.

One in every five Yemeni schools is out of use, according to Unicef. But at this one, teachers decided to open it despite the damage, so that education could continue."

Produced by Orla Guerin, Goktay Koraltan, Claire Read, Ahmed Baider and Suad al-Salahi.

Covid, Brando and Moore what's more

   

[Colour-blind Covid warning]

Imagine...6 months from now the Covid-19 virus is able to breed in the air. 

   We are all scrabbling suddenly on the internet to buy "virus- safe" filters for the windows and air conditioners in our houses after another full lockdown/confinement/quarantine/international panic. 

   Imagine...There's the above possibility (or "potential", the word I keep hearing everywhere on mainstream media and the Twittersphere.) 

Somehow in my mind this is connected with a brilliant documentary I watched yesterday ("Listen to Me Marlon") on that most authentic of humans, Brando. He was one of the first males to use the power of suggestion in body and face language and movement, all coming from his harvesting and harnessing of childhood memory of his mother and a solitary upbringing in the open air and nature. 

He realised the primacy and goodness of Tahitians, indigenous first nation Americans, and was one of the few celebrities who put his body on the line in the early proto-BlackLivesMatter public protests in the late 1960s. 

He was with Martin Luther King around the time he was assassinated and years later still felt moved enough that he could still recall the sound of that brave soul's voice. Brando seemed to work and live his life as an expression of pure authenticity. 

One of the few writers who is doing the same today is Suzanne Moore. She just reeks of it: the unabashed openness of being herself. In a highly unfashionable act, she wrote recently about the importance of Freud, remembering him as he understood the babyish primacy of memory, childhood, want and nakedness.

"The Pickpocket Slaves of Europe"

"The pickpocket slaves of Europe have prompted a major international investigation by the Netherlands regarding the...forced child pickpockets in Europe…

In Eastern Europe, children are living what the Dutch press calls a modern Oliver Twist story.  

Some of the children are being held against their will and forced to beg and steal their way around Western European cities.

According to the findings of an international investigation called Operation 13Oceans, these young thieves, as young as 8 years old, are picking pockets and involved in other petty crimes in the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Germany, and Spain.

Several kids appeared on the radar of the Dutch police when they saw the same faces over and over again, with different names each time. They had picked them up, booked them, and let them out on the streets again, in a never ending cycle. 

Eventually, as the cops ran their faces through the databases of Europol and other international organizations, a list of around 300 kids emerged. 

The children are invisible victims because it is hard for society to see the sinister hand of organized human trafficking that lies behind the petty thievery that afflicts so many European cities, helping to stoke the anger against “migrants,” many of whom are Roma, but many of whom are not.

A Dutch prosecutor said, “What you see is often not what it appears. When you see a mother begging with a child, for instance, you don’t necessarily think about the infant being forced to serve as a prop for a woman who is not its mother at all.”

Another member of 13Oceans added, “As the children get older, they are forced to steal for a criminal organization. We are actively watching four international criminal networks.” More specifics were not given, since the investigation in ongoing.  But the ages of the children range from 8 to 16, he said.

In the past, investigators tended to look at this issue as pickpocketing or so-called mobile banditry offenses…but now in this case the children are considered victims rather than offenders.  Some of the victims are demanded to steal up to [$1,115] a day."

Read more from source here.

"The Empty Womb: the tale of a precarious and childless generation"

 "I often ask my friends how they see themselves ten years from now. We know what we will do next week, but not in three months. Will I have a job? Will I have a home? Will I have met somebody? 

The capacity to predict our own lives doesn’t exist, because the precariousness has dynamited the possibility of visualising our future. 

The dynamics have been configured to make everything last only a short time: buy that which you will eat for dinner tonight, we will see what it will be tomorrow; maybe in one month you won’t have a job; remember that next year your rental contract will end. 

The uncertainty generated by the crisis [of/since 2008] has not only rocked our expectations, but also our most primitive certainties; those that I thought would always exist even when I didn’t have anything material to hang on to: a child, for example. A panorama that doesn’t allow anything but short-term thinking, pure survival. A scenario in which to think about having children causes panic. But not having them, if you desire to, also causes panic. 

This book deals with putting off having children in the generation of the 25 to 35 year olds. Also about those who when they were about to have a child, they lost their jobs. It reflects on the fear of having children and on the fear of not ever having them. A collective tale that talks about how our bodies have been crossed by precariousness. And about putting it all off until we don’t know when."


Above is the publisher's summary of Noemí López Trujillo's, El vientre vacío. Relato de una generación precaria y sin hijos [The empty womb: the tale of a precarious and childless generation], 2019.

Source: an excellent blog on Spanish and Portugese literature: Literary Rambles.

Review of "This Boy's Life" -- My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

It’s a great relief to read something as authentic as this memoir of Tobias Wolff’s childhood.

In 2018, when (even for adults) predictable superhero and action movies are dominating the western world’s popular culture as a form of escapism, my bowels were nicely warmed by having come across a one euro second hand copy of this little printed gem in Barcelona. 

It had been republished in 1994, seemingly given away with an end of year issue of ‘Esquire’, a North American men’s magazine.

I happily absorbed all the low-lights of the author’s young life in Concrete, a small company-town just south of the Canadian border, dominated by a cement factory. 

The reader learns that Jack (as he preferred to be called, after novelist Jack London) needed to drag himself through an upbringing that had all the underhandedness of Spain’s ultra-conservative government and the punishing violence of a month in Syria. 

Punches and kicks at school were the norm and sometimes the same at home with added insults from Dwight, an ornery stepfather who drank to excess whenever he had the money to indulge.

Like plenty of working class women of her era, Jack’s bright and capable mother is shown to be trapped in low paying jobs and a string of abusive relationships. In a sign of what is to come, she and Dwight come back early from their two-day honeymoon “silent and grim, not even looking at each other.”

One of the refreshing things about this autobiography is how honest Wolff is about his own character. 

With the perception of a fine mimic, he picks apart his family and friends but he also openly acknowledges how he uses lies to beef up his status with the locals and how he steals like a modern-day financier. 

Wolff even details the deceptive methods he employed to swindle his way into an (unsuccessful) scholarship interview for an expensive private high school.

Touchingly, the author also explains where he found relief from the daily grind of school and unending chores at home. 

Through music he gained some mental freedom and earning boy scout symbols provided a way to “compel respect, or at least civility from those who shared them and envy from those who did not.”

The official scout publications (where the book’s title comes from) Wolff read with the kind of fanaticism that is common in teenagers. “What I liked about [their] Handbook,” he remembers, “was its voice, the bluff hail-fellow language by which it tried to make being a good boy adventurous, even romantic.” 

The Scout Magazine he reads in a trance, “accepting without question its narcotic invitation to believe that I was really no different from the boys whose hustle and pluck it celebrated...Reading about these boys made me restless, feverish with schemes.”

As you can see, for a book that was first published in the late 1980s its language is pleasingly still rooted in a much earlier post World War II rural USA.

As well as this, Wolff’s work stands out to me because it examines a cross-section of American society that is still badly neglected in English language literature. Today, these are the same gun-carrying people who voted Donald Trump into the White House, in the hope of something better for their receding lives and now dead or dying industries.

In a recent interview, Tobias Wolff quoted Auden’s line that “writing an autobiography [is] like being a leper showing his sores in the marketplace.” 

He could just as easily have mentioned Flannery O’Connor, who argued that anyone who survives adolescence has enough material to write about.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2018.]

"What Works For Getting Kids to Enjoy Reading?"

Excerpted from “The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads” by Daniel T. Willingham...
  

Getting Kids to Read 

I said at the outset that our goal is simply to get kids reading—it’s reading, not positive attitudes toward reading that will make for better lexical representations and broader background knowledge. But then we saw that reading attitudes, reading self-image, and frequency of reading are interconnected. So in fact, getting kids to read will not only improve their reading, it will make them like reading more. Getting children to like reading more in order to prompt more reading is not our only option. We can reverse it—get them reading more, and that will improve reading attitudes and reading self-concept. Well then, how do we prompt a child with negative or indifferent attitudes toward reading to pick up a book?

Rewards? 

Adults are frequently confronted with children who don’t want to do what we want them to do. A common solution is to use rewards or punishments as short-term motivators. What if I told a fourth-grader, “If you read a chapter of that book, you can have some ice cream”? The child will likely take me up on the deal and it sounds like he’d have a positive experience. And that’s what we said we’re aiming for, positive reading experiences.

Rewards do work, at least in the short term. If you find a reward that the child cares about, he will read in order to get it. The problem is that you don’t get the attitude boost we’ve predicted. In fact, the attitude is often less positive because of the reward. The classic experiment on this phenomenon was conducted in a preschool. A set of really attractive Magic Markers appeared during free play, and the researchers confirmed that kids often chose the markers from among many toys. Then the markers disappeared from the classroom. A few weeks later, researchers took kids, one at a time, into a separate room. They offered the child a fancy “good player” certificate if she would draw with the markers. Other kids were given the opportunity to draw with the markers but were not offered the certificate. A few weeks later, the Magic Markers reappeared in the classroom. The kids who got the certificate showed notably less interest in the Magic Markers than the kids who didn’t get the certificate. The reward had backfired. It had made kids like the markers less.

The interpretation of the study rests on how kids think about their own behavior. The rewarded kids likely thought, “I drew with the markers because I was offered a reward to do so. Now here are the markers, but no reward. So why would I draw with them?” There have been many studies of rewards in academic contexts, and they often backfire in this way."

Read more from source here.

Is Spain a parents' paradise? - A reprinted except from my book "The Remade Parent"

Republished this week on Child in the City was the following extract of my non-fiction book, The Remade Parent...

"Different countries have different relationships with their children, something that can be especially evident to immigrants. In his new book, The Re-Made Parent: why we are losing our children and how we can get them back, the Australian, Brett Hetherington, a resident of Barcelona, wonders whether Spain may just be a ‘paradise’ for parents. We publish edited extracts here.

Some parents (including myself) believe that, compared to many other countries, Spain is generally a more physically secure place for children and adults alike. For instance… In 2000, the Parliament in Spain’s autonomous region of Navarra passed a ground breaking law allowing all registered couples in that region (including same-sex couples) to adopt children. (In the first Chapter of this book I made the point that a parent should be thought of as anyone who can provide to a child continuous care, concern and affection.)…
The pride that so many adults and children have of their town and region means that they often take an active interest in defending it and being part of its collective life. A lot less Spaniards move away from their home area than say, North Americans, which creates bonds of attachment to the people and places of they grew up with. In other words, adults and younger people “know their roots” here and have a fundamental respect for them.

 

Public, not commercial, space

Related to this point above is the fact that in Spain there are plenty of public open spaces that are not there to be commercial. The plazas are not shopping centres and the ramblas are not principally designed for trade. The parks are many and they are not “retail parks” for buying and selling. The town square is not a “mall” but is instead reserved for festivals or protests.
All these places are for idling, strolling, gathering and talking, socialising and playing. They are social by their nature and they function as spaces for community activities rather than for simply spending money. To someone like myself who grew up with the focal point of young life being a multi-storey shopping centre, I am happy to know that my son and his friends will not be spending their free time sitting around in a place where everyone is first and foremost a consumer.
Blanca, a mother of three who has also lived in several countries outside the Iberian Peninsula has a view of Spain that certainly sums up many of the benefits of residing in this country. Her words make a fitting conclusion to the case in favour of Spain being a parental paradise:
“I think children feel more free here than in many other countries. They can run and play because you can count on friends and neighbours. In England I didn’t feel this. People there just mind their own business and look the other way. We all know each other here and you spend more time together.


The Re-Made Parent: why we are losing our children and how we can get them back by Brett Hetherington is available here

"A Children's Book Introduces German Kids to the True Story of Syrian Refugees"

[Credit: Jan Birck]

"There are now more than 65 million people displaced by conflict in the world, the highest level ever recorded. Half of these refugees are children.

Germany has received more than 1 million refugees, mostly from Syria and Iraq. Despite supporters initially celebrating Chancellor Angela Merkel's actions, many Germans have begun voicing concerns about when this acceptance of migrants will come to an end.

But while the adults in Germany have expressed mixed reactions to the refugees, German author Kirsten Boie wants children at least to realize that a refugee child is just like any other kid in the world.

In her latest children’s book, “Everything Will Be Alright,” she writes the true story of Rahaf and her family, who flee Homs, Syria due to bombings by war planes. The family crosses the Mediterranean Sea on a small boat, ultimately choosing a small town near Hamburg, Germany to start their new lives.

The book is published in German and Arabic and is meant to be read at school to both German-born children and their new immigrant neighbors. (An English translation is available online here.)"

Listen to this story on PRI.org »

"Steinbeck, Scuppers and trains" - My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

As a child, the great American author John Steinbeck was inspired by a scene with a bird in it: a stork. He cherished a toy ‘Easter looking-egg’ which he loved to peer into through a tiny hole, seeing “a lovely little farm, a kind of dream farm, and on the farmhouse chimney a stork sitting on a nest." 

Steinbeck had taken this setting to be pure fantasy but to his surprise saw the same thing in real life one day in Denmark.

My own young imagination, before I could even read, had been fired by books like Margaret Wise Brown’s ‘Scuppers The Sailor Dog’ with its superbly memorable illustrations by Garth Williams. I would always ask my mother to read me this story and one scene in particular is imprinted on my memory even still. I’m sure that it fed my unconscious with a deep desire to travel.

Brave Scuppers is asleep in a warm bunk bed in his cosy, wood-paneled ship’s cabin. The ship is tossing because I can see that the light is swinging from the roof and outside through the round porthole window the sea is choppy. Under his bed are his new shoes that he picked out from a shop, pictured on the previous page. Scuppers rejected a different pair as being ‘too fancy’ because they were curly at the toe ends.

This shop (where he also bought a ‘bushel’ of oranges) had palm trees outside and a woman in a veil walking by, seemingly in a hurry. I’d never seen either of those things before and didn’t know the word ‘exotic’ then but that’s what I was thinking in my forming child’s outlook. When I got to Morocco twenty five years later and saw the same curly shoes that Scuppers had passed over, I felt what must have been a similiar satisfying surprise as John Steinbeck had once enjoyed.

Travel has a way of also emboldening us because we are out of the realm of home’s familiar touches.

Consciously, my love affair with travelling on trains began just over two decades ago when my partner Paula and I spent over three months on different forms of them getting across Europe. As a child and young adult I’d barely been on a train before but there was something either in my ancestral memory or a different kind of spark that kindled a vague interest in a different sort of transport, aside from buses or planes. Maybe it was hearing Neil Diamond on TV when I was eight years old. I still recall him singing:

It's a beautiful noise

Goin' on ev'rywhere

Like the clickety-clack

Of a train on a track

It's got rhythm to spare

In this song too he poeticised the sounds of big city street as music to the ear and my budding brain was intrigued by this idea. Living in quiet suburbia where the high-pitched ‘ninga-ninga’ of summer lawn movers was the most common weekend noise, I’d never heard anything like the kind of thing in Diamond’s lyrics and his clear affection for the pulse and grind of the metropolis. It has stayed with me in the same way that thoughts on a train trip from over twenty years ago will now and then float back into memory.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, February 2016.]

"To screen or not to screen?" - My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

As I write this, my son is hating me.

Last night I took a computer game off him that his mother and I agreed was violent and told him he would not be getting it back. He is twelve years old and naturally, he disagreed.

But I am not badly disturbed by his feelings toward me. I know they are temporary and I trust in the knowledge that sometimes parents will be hugely unpopular with our own children...if we are being moral, ethical parents - involved parents.

In this part of the world people get a lot right about how children are treated. One of the most notable things is how older children are largely both tolerant and even downright nice to their younger brothers and sisters, as well as to other littler kids they are not related to at all.

In Mediterranean Europe, the family unit is close and socialising with the extended family of grandparents, cousins and other blood relatives is a common part of almost every one's weekly life.

This is in stark contrast to standard Anglo families.

But I would argue that across this stretch of the planet (but probably in other parts, such as North America as well) parents are much too concerned with their children's happiness.

This may sound like a harsh, uncaring statement so it needs a bit of explanation. To me (and to plenty of full-time philosophers) happiness is a temporary state. It comes and goes under it's own invisible steam and can arrive and disappear before we hardly realise it.

The more we desperately look for it or try to manufacture it the more it seems to slip through our fingers.

I'm not advocating that we don't do our best to create situations where our kids are likely to find enjoyment or fun - quite the contrary.

But if we put happiness, which is by its nature a short-term sensation, ahead of trying to develop a son or daughter with a sense of what is right and what is wrong, then we are making a terrible mistake.

If we act and speak by instinctively putting our children's immediate gratification as the priority instead of doing what we can so that they are playing and learning in ways that are beneficial to them (at least in the medium or longer term) what is the logical result?

Years later you end up with adults who value getting as many petty possessions as they can (because materialism is supposed to create contentment) and to them this a thousand times more important than having something as bothersome as a conscience, which just gets in the way of fueling a bigger bank account.

In other words, you have corruption and you have it on a grand scale. The Mediterranean disease.

I accept that the inclination towards having happy children is a healthy one. I just don't accept that this injection of happiness should always be the most important thing.

Faced with the choice of being strongly disliked by my son for a period of time or, on the other hand, turning a blind eye to him exercising disturbing impulses for potentially hours on end, I'd choose unpopularity every time.

Knowing what we now know about how violent, first-person computer games will desensitise even adult users (and that is why modern military training uses simulated war-games) it would be almost a crime to be the indulgent parent.

[A version of this article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, March 2014.]

"The Remade Parent" now available

 

I am extremely happy to say that my new non-fiction book is finally now available as a Kindle e-book (at only $4.82.) 

It includes a chapter looking at parenting in Spain.

The print-on-demand soft-back version will soon also be for sale...

Education in Catalonia - My latest article for Catalonia Today magazine

  

 [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.

Links:

[http://www.oecd.org/edu/imhe/46826969.pdf]

http://www.slideshare.net/vsanz/catalan-educational-system-presentation

http://www.iese.edu/research/pdfs/di-0810-e.pdf

http://www.educacio.novaciutadania.bcn.cat/en/the-educational-system-in-spain-and-catalonia_582