Advertising, education and aging.

On the outer door to our block of flats is a notice: NO SE ADMITE PUBLICIDAD. In other words, no advertising material is supposed to be allowed. I say “supposed to be allowed” because our letter boxes are always stuffed with leaflets of all kinds. How does this happen? Well, when we first visited this flat the outer door was locked. For a good while now that lock has not been working. In fact the door is often left wide open. No-one can get into the building as the inner door is locked but it’s an open invitation to anyone who wants to come and put all kinds of nonsense in the postboxes. 

 Amongst the nonsense I found a flier for Profesor Sali, “Famoso vidente”, a famous seer. He claims that there is no problem without solution and offers to deal with anything from finding work to curing sexual impotence, going through evil eye (mal de ojo in Spanish) and getting rid of evil spirits. Perhaps the government of the Spain, if not of every country, should approach him to sort out the state the world has got into. I didn’t know that people still believed in such things but he must get enough customers to make it worth his while to pay for advertising. It’s like a step back in time to my mother always buying “lucky” heather from the gypsies to prevent them from putting the evil eye on her. But then I suppose that in difficult times people will turn to almost any means of solving their problems. 

 Another step back in time was reported in an article in La Voz de Galicia the other day. Small village schools are having to combine age groups in their classes as there are not enough pupils to justify separate teachers. One elderly lady commented that it was like when she was a girl and the village school just had one class for everyone. Shades of Laurie Lee’s school in “Cider with Rosie” or in fact the school my mother said that she attended in darkest Yorkshire. Primary school numbers are down generally in Galicia, however. It’s not just country places. Even though I still see lots of people pushing prams around here, the numbers of children starting school here has been going down steadily since 2011. 

In contrast, the numbers staying on after age 16 to do Bachillerato and particularly to do Formación Profesional, vocational training courses, has continued to rise. Hardly surprising given the high rate of youth unemployment. 

All the bookshops are full of text books for the coming year, about to start tomorrow for the little ones and next Monday for the secondary school students and beyond. I swear this is what keeps so many small bookshops open in this country while they are closing down at a furious rate of knots in the UK. It must be quite daunting to have a buy a huge pile of school books every September, especially as it is rare for the same books to be used the following year, making it impossible to recycle big brother’s books for use by younger siblings. On the plus side, I read that more and more “bancos de libros de textos”, book banks, are being set up to help needy families. 

Also on the increase (up by 23%) are “centros plurilingües”, schools which teach lessons in more than one language, usually Castilian Spanish/Galician but increasingly English as well. This has led to a related increase (smaller at 6% but still an increase) in the use of “auxiliares de conversación”, which we used to call “assistants”, French style, as most schools using them were in France. More employment here for my former students then. All good. 

What’s more, according to this article  Galicia is guaranteeing itself a generation of long-lived people. (Do they really want that? I wonder, given the current unemployment situation and the resulting shortage of tax payers to fund the pensions of the aged. Oh, how complicated life is.) 

Be that as it may, from what I read in the above-mentioned article, being able to switch from one language to another is a strong factor in keeping the brain active and staving off aging. Other things are running, walking and swimming. Well, I do all of those so I plan to be writing this blog when I’m ninety-odd!