"Demand for Garraf's international schools is growing..."

News video of the school where my wife Paula teaches.

(Of course, not all the students/families there are "foreigners" because there's plenty of local Catalan/Spanish kids too.)

"These days the educational centers are already thinking about the pre-registration periods for the next school year starting in September, including the international schools in the region. These are private centers that are noticing a notable increase in demand, from families who want to send their children to school in an educational system different from the one designed by the Catalan administration. The arrival of new foreign families in Garraf is one of the factors that explain this increase."

"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.]

"Jokerman" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

  

[Photo: EFE]

Unlike this summer’s extreme weather, which came to Europe then went, extreme conservative governments have also recently come but unfortunately don’t seem to be going.

In the UK, the latest incarnation of this threat to the average person is the new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson (or simply ‘Boris,’ as plenty of his fellow media personalities call him.) 

But there is only one important question to be asked about him. Who will he and his Conservative Party govern for?

The answer is already clear. If we ignore all his populist, nationalistic public language and ignore his long history of incompetence, his almost continual episodes of self-serving immorality and if we also ignore his continuing catalogue of lies and vile racist and homophobic insults, there is still something much more important than all that staring us in the face.

The fact is that Boris Johnson has always represented no-one else other than the exact same kind of young males who he is pictured alongside in the ‘Wall of Fame’ at Eton, the school where only Britain’s wealthiest families send their children.

In other words, Boris Johnson will continue to act only for the richest part of the social spectrum. His first policy announcement after he declared he would run for the party’s leadership was calculated to let the rich know that he was still well and truly on their side. He stated he would give tax cuts to 3 million higher income earners.

As well as that he is arguing for further cuts to business tax, even though UK corporation tax rates are “one of the lowest...among developed economies, with successive reductions taking it from 28% in 2008 to 19% now.”

The great problem with schools like Eton where Johnson (and 20 other former UK Prime Ministers) went, is that, according to Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine, it is a major part of “an archaic system that teaches those who belong to it that they are destined for the kind of greatness that others cannot reach.”

The idea of a personal destiny is appealing to people like Johnson because as adults it means they believe that they never have to show ability. “Preparatory” boarding schools such as Eton brainwash their young at a time in their lives when they are highly impressionable, being away from their families for almost the entire academic year. In essence, they instill the value of ultimate self-confidence as superior to expertise. 

This is exactly the root cause of Britain’s wider mediocrity in much of it’s politics and business; it comes from a social class system that virtually insists on taking nothing at all too seriously.

Johnson’s public image as a mumbling, bumbling, patriotic jokester is initially easy to like. He has a light-hearted charm which works with Anglo people who don’t like anyone to be earnest for very long. Comedy is good entertainment, they’d say. 

This tone of amusement was also something Johnson used in his earlier career in journalism and writing. Astonishingly, he wrote a sexist and offensive novel titled Seventy-Two Virgins – A Comedy of Errors (published in 2004) where the main character, obviously entirely based on Johnson, becomes a hero during a terrorist attack. The hand of destiny again.

Ultimately, Johnson is hellbent on “delivering” Brexit at any cost to the middle and working class people of his country. The irony here is that as recently as 2013 he wrote a newspaper article that advised his fellow cabinet ministers “to stop blaming Brussels for all our problems.”

Now though, we have him and his Brexit to more accurately blame. Johnson’s jokes are all the more hollow and the saddest joke is on us.

[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, Sept. 2019.]

"Getting Orwell wrong" -- My latest opinion column for Catalonia Today magazine

[Photo of  Julian Barnes © Alan Edwards]

: 

In the New York Review of Books not long ago, the well-known British author Julian Barnes ran his eye over some compilations of George Orwell’s work. Thinking about the school where a young Orwell was sent to live and learn, Barnes decides:

“You have to feel a little sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan Wilkes, or “Sambo” and “Flip” as they were known to their [students]. During the first decades of the twentieth century, they ran St. Cyprian’s, a preparatory school in Eastbourne, on the south coast of England. It was no worse than many other such establishments: the food was bad, the building underheated, physical punishment the norm… [The children’s] daily morale was dependent on whether a boy was in or out of favour with Flip.”

So Barnes would have us keep our sympathy for the pair of sadists who ran Orwell’s primary school like a hideous boot camp and he justifies their cruelty by maintaining that other schools were much the same. He expresses no feelings at all for the unfortunate people that Orwell spent time writing about in his essays ‘How The Poor Die’ or ‘The Spike’ (destitute tramps).

Just as importantly though, according to Barnes (as an adult), Orwell was a “moralist and a puritan”. But a single quick read of Orwell’s novel “1984” would show you that Orwell was well-versed in matters of the flesh and desire. The sexual relationship between the main character Winston and his lover Julia makes it abundantly clear that Orwell was no puritan. (Apparently, away from his writing Orwell was somewhat of a lech, whose methods of seduction occasionally included the sudden kiss and grope technique).

As far as Orwell being a moralist, of course Barnes is right. I have read all of Orwell’s non-fiction (much of it several times) and can see that there is hardly a sentence that does not have a moral aspect to it.

But Barnes is using the word moralist as uncomplimentary in his book review. The question must be whether someone’s morals are humanitarian and progressive morals, not whether they have any at all. An absence of morals or ethics is a vacuum of beliefs about how we treat each other.

He also correctly criticises Orwell for being wrong about the future, and Orwell was certainly mistaken about some aspects of the “1984 Orwellian world”. For example, the state is shrivelling rather than being the monster machine Orwell predicted. That function has been assumed by international capitalism rather than international government.

Julian Barnes also says that Orwell “is deeply untheoretical and wary of general conclusions that do not come from specific experiences.” But of course a thought is an experience and when it is repeated then built on it can become un-singular enough to produce theories.

I think Orwell was profoundly theoretical, in fact. He simply did an excellent job of disguising it because he did not trust in ideas alone. A good idea can quickly become a bad one when it bumps up against the physical world and human nature. Communism is an example of this, as he discovered.

I think it would be more accurate to say that Orwell was certainly suspicious of those who did not ’love the soil’ as he did. He had a sensible distaste of pretence, pomposity and the grandiose. In short, he disliked intellectuals as a species but used his intellect to point out his own shortcomings as well as those of others.

Barnes is wrong to say that Orwell was “deeply untheoretical” just because Orwell’s writing did not use obviously theoretical language. Underneath the plain phrases and continual drawing from his experiences, Orwell’s work was bursting with theories about the human condition.

It’s a pity that Barnes has seemingly missed that.

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

"Why British boarding schools produce bad leaders"

[Boarders … Boris Johnson and David Cameron. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA]

 "In Britain, the link between private boarding education and leadership is gold-plated. 

If their parents can afford it, children are sent away from home to walk a well-trodden path that leads straight from boarding school through Oxbridge to high office in institutions such as the judiciary, the army, the City and, especially, government. 

Our prime minister was only seven when he was sent away to board at Heatherdown preparatory school in Berkshire. 

Like so many of the men who hold leadership roles in Britain, he learned to adapt his young character to survive both the loss of his family and the demands of boarding school culture. The psychological impact of these formative experiences on Cameron and other boys who grow up to occupy positions of great power and responsibility cannot be overstated. It leaves them ill-prepared for relationships in the adult world and the nation with a cadre of leaders who perpetuate a culture of elitism, bullying and misogyny affecting the whole of society.

Nevertheless, this golden path is as sure today as it was 100 years ago, when men from such backgrounds led us into a disastrous war; it is familiar, sometimes mocked, but taken for granted. But it is less well known that costly, elite boarding consistently turns out people who appear much more competent than they actually are. They are particularly deficient in non-rational skills, such as those needed to sustain relationships, and are not, in fact, well-equipped to be leaders in today's world

I have been doing psychotherapy with ex-boarders for 25 years and I am a former boarding-school teacher and boarder. My pioneering study of privileged abandonment always sparks controversy: so embedded in British life is boarding that many struggle to see beyond the elitism and understand its impact. The prevalence of institutionalised abuse is finally emerging to public scrutiny, but the effects of normalised parental neglect are more widespread and much less obvious. Am I saying, then, that David Cameron, and the majority of our ruling elite, were damaged by boarding?"

Read more from source here.

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

Does this sound familiar...?

The events of the 1590s had suddenly brought home to more thoughtful Castilians the harsh truth about their native land – its poverty in the midst of riches, its power that had shown itself impotent…

For this was not only a time of crisis, but a time also of the awareness of crisis – of a bitter realization that things had gone wrong. It was under the influence of the arbitristas that early seventeenth-century Castile surrendered itself to an orgy of national introspection, desperately attempting to discover at what point reality had been exchanged for illusion….

The arbitristas proposed that Government expenditure should be slashed…

Most of the arbitristas recommended the reduction of schools and convents and the clearing of the Court as the solution to the problem. Yet this was really to mistake the symptoms for the cause.

MartínGonzález de Cellorigo was almost alone in appreciating that the fundamental problem lay not so much in heavy spending by Crown and upper classes –since this spending itself created a valuable demand for goods and services – as in the disproportion between expenditure and investment.

‘Money is not true wealth,’ he wrote, and his concern was to increase the national wealth by increasing the nation’s productive capacity rather than its stock of precious metals. This could only be achieved by investing more money in agricultural and industrial development. At present, surplus wealth was being unproductively invested –‘dissipated on thin air – on papers, contracts, censos, and letters of exchange, on cash, and silver, and gold – instead of being expended on things that yield profits and attract riches from outside to augment the riches within.And thus there is no money, gold, or silver in Spain because there is so much; and it is not rich, because of all its riches….’

The Castile of González de Cellorigo was…a society in which both money and labour were misapplied; an unbalanced, top-heavy society, in which, according to González, there were thirty parasites for every one man who did an honest day’s work; a society with a false sense of values, which mistook the shadow for substance, and substance for the shadow.

J.H. Elliott, Imperial Spain: 1469-1716

[Many thanks to Tom Young for sending me the above text.]

What British educators can learn from Spain (and other countries)

Below is an edited version of the text of a short piece that I wrote recently for an article in the Guardian on-line’s education section...

“If I could point to one idea that I would bring back to the UK from overseas it would be that that awful corporate-speak word 'innovation' - though I would call it creative teaching, rather than anything else.

In Spain, it's uplifting to see how older kids treat and care for younger ones, and this is done naturally and informally, not with prefects or head boys or head girls. The quality of school food is generally good there, and Britain can learn from the health benefits of this.

In Australia, where I was blooded as a teacher during my first four years, educators were encouraged to take risks with their teaching methods, whether this was bringing in sometimes slightly unpredictable guest speakers into the classroom or just simply reading poetry outside in the sunshine. Also, one or two states in Australia have not relied so heavily on exams and testing to assess students' knowledge and abilities. This has given teachers more choice and lets students produce work not purely for regurgitation in an exam.

It's easy to say that we should take personal and collective responsibility for our schools, but in Japan you will see teachers and students every afternoon, side by side, mopping and sweeping the corridors, classrooms and toilets. Admittedly, the low level of attention often paid to this ritual meant that the school was more spiritually clean than physically clean but there is a lot to be said for 'doing the dirty work' together.”

The other contributors to the piece, teaching in Bhutan, New Zealand, China, New York and Qatar are also worth a read and (as usual) some of the comments underneath the article are  interesting as well.

A New Year Warning!

The (Catholic) bishop of Córdoba has a New Year revelation for us all. He believes that UNESCO has a program to make half the population homosexual and says that this United Nations organization is bent on “implanting an ideology” that already supports this theory in schools.

He then goes on to warn that sexuality is not “a game of pleasure “and on the subject of abortion states that “Spain walks proud of her progress towards her own destruction” due to a declining birthrate.

I look forward to more pearls of wisdom from church spokesmen over the coming twelve months.

A Spanish voice of reason on Islam, clothing and schools

"Islamophobia, the successor to our centuries-old tradition of anti-Semitism. In short, the rejection of the other…

One of the most commonly heard arguments these days runs along the following lines: if progressives want to remove crucifixes from classrooms, how can they accept the presence of female pupils wearing hijabs? What this question overlooks is that the classroom is a public space, paid for with taxpayers’ money, and run by the state, and where teachers and pupils of different faiths meet. The state is supposedly secular, so there can be no official use of religious symbols.

But wearing the hijab, the kippah or a crucifix is a personal decision, and should be seen along the same lines as wearing a particular team’s soccer shirt, or a t-shirt with a band name on it.”[ Javier Valenzuela writing in El Pais.]

My own logic would also suggest that unless there is a bigoted slogan on a t-shirt or depicts acts of violence then it should be allowed… (Or unless a student is half-naked) I see no reason to bother with them.

The enormous amounts of time and energy spent in schools (and recently the media) discussing and dealing with the subject of student’s clothing is ridiculous.

And why is this such a popular subject? Mainly, because it is a tangible subject. You can see it. It therefore suits the small-minded. It is easier to deal with than bullying, racism or the reluctance of many parents to be involved in their children’s education. So it gets the most attention, even though it does not deserve it.

Spain's schools start questioning Muslim dress

Four months ago I said in a previous blog about France that “in Spain it has not (yet) got to the point of banning the veil.”

Now it appears that it has reached this point.

Senén Olano a resident of Lugo in the Galicia region complains in this Letter to the Editor about the case of a pupil at a public high school in Lugo who had been asked by the directors of the school to stop attending classes for the past month. Allegedly, this was due to her refusal to take off her hijab or headscarf.

He goes on to say: “What the media did not mention so often was that the school board had asked the Galician regional education department for advice on the matter, receiving silence for an answer.

Now it appears that the girl attends class with her ‘hijab’, which is not only a garment with a clear religious significance in a country with a secular tradition, but also one which, historically and culturally, reflects the oppression of women by men in Islamic culture and contravenes habitual customs in our classrooms. Such cases will become more and more frequent and a clear and uniform response is what is needed. Public officials are paid to make such decisions, so it’s time they got to work.”

I agree with Mr Olano about only one of the points that he raises. A “uniform response” is needed.

That response should be that all public schools allow their students and staff to wear whatever clothes they wish to, as long as those clothes do not display offensive slogans (such as: “Ban the hijab!”)

As a (tolerant) atheist, I worked in an Islamic school in Australia for several months and was never told to change my usual work clothes to anything more pious or Muslim-like.

I would question why the writer of that letter, Mr Olano, does not explain which “habitual customs in our classrooms” are being contravened.

I also wonder whether he has had more than a fleeting involvement with any Muslim.