The little girl comments: Look at him, giving himself airs because they bought him designer trainers to come back to school .... but then all his pens and pencils and stuff come from the Chinese shop.Two examples of school snobbery there!
Personally I think the Chinese shops are excellent: - stationery items, kitchen equipment, household tools, novelty mugs shaped like cows, almost anything you might need and dirt cheap! What more could you ask for? Well, in Madrid the Chinese shops also sell frozen bottles of water in the summer months to keep tourists cool and hydrated!
For parents of back-to-schoolers it’s a pity they don’t also sell schoolbooks. I read that the price of text books has gone up by 1.78%, which doesn’t sound much until you discover that parents will spend an average of 183 Euros per child this year on text books, many of them used for only one year.
For those just starting school the books are usually one-off workbooks, intended to be written in. Then the government amends the Ley Orgánica de Educación every once in a while, leading to changes in books. This year it’s the turn of years 5 and 6 of primary schools. Some parts of Spain actively encourage the re-use of text books while others prefer to give subsidies and grants. Galicia does a mix of the two.
There are huge amounts of money available for grants but I read somewhere that in order to qualify you need to be a family with four children and earn less than 1500 Euros a month. Apparently about 45% of Galician households survive on less than 1500 Euros a month and it is expected that this percentage will increase with la crisis and el paro.
What is hidden, of course, is the number of young people earning that sort of money and finding it impossible to leave the parental home for that reason. I recently read a report in which a young man explained how he lived on 800 Euros a month. Part of the secret is going back to his pueblo after finding life in Madrid too expensive. In his pueblo he shares accommodation with two others and only pays 50 euros a month in rent. Then he is able to use the produce of la huerta del abuelo (his grandfather’s kitchen garden) to supplement his diet and reduce the food bills. He is fully aware that he could not survive on his current income if he moved to somewhere like Vigo but for the moment he is content and even manages to save enough to go on holiday for a month in the summer.
On the education front, they are still discussing the feasibility of bilingual and even trilingual education, English being the third language. Further up the educational ladder there is FP, Formación Profesional, vocational education which, to an outsider at least, seems to work. For a long time it was the poor relation of secondary education as everyone wanted their child to follow the academic route of the bachillerato, just as when I was a child everyone wanted their offspring to go to the grammar school and not the secondary modern.
Nowadays, FP seems to be recognised as an alternative route into both work and university. Some sectors of FP even get more than 70% of their students into jobs. But even there not everything is rosy. Many of these successful job-finding areas – carpentry and furniture making, maritime and fishing industry, vehicle maintenance, electronics – are having difficulty filling their classrooms this school year here in Galicia. And this is a region where the value of FP is recognised; FP has six times the take-up here as in the rest of Spain!
Is this problem still a little bit of educational snobbery?
Wasn't there also a 'techical college' third option to the grammar and the secondary modern?
ReplyDeleteSome places had that 3-tier system but not all. It still exists in some parts of Germany. Of course, back in the day Secondary Modern Schools offered their own version of FP. Girls did shorthand and typing courses while boys could do car maintenance or woodwork.
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