A Normal School Day

On Monday, something extraordinary will happen. Children will be going to school. It is easy to forget that there are such things as schools, given the endless summer holidays now about to come to an end.

The return to school – “vuelta al cole” – is more of a ritual than an educational process. This ritual involves, amongst other things, column inches in the press devoted to the minutiae of the new school year. To this end, therefore, we are told that 129,569 pupils will be attending schools in the Balearics and that they will be taught by 11,366 teachers.

We are also told that, in Palma for instance, 162 police officers will be on traffic duty to ensure smooth circulation at “hot spots” and to ensure good order. Last year, a total of 534 officers throughout the Balearics oversaw the return to school. It is reassuring to know that the forces of law are on hand to prevent any trouble among rival gangs of hoody five-year-olds or unrest between parents jockeying for parking spaces in their 4x4s.

We are also informed that it costs, on average, 825 euros to kit out junior with his uniform, his sportswear, his books and pencil cases. And come the day, on Monday, the press will be at the ready to learn whether the return to school has passed off “normally”. This is perhaps the strangest part of the whole ritual, as each year the normality (or not) is reported. Why should it not pass off normally? What would constitute an abnormal return to school? Finding there isn’t a school any more? Whole classes of pupils being abducted by aliens?

It is, one has to conclude, the sheer abnormality of children actually going to school that makes the vuelta al cole such a big news item. Yet for all that one can raise eyebrows at a summer holiday that starts when it is still spring and ends almost as autumn’s leaves begin to fall, the Mallorcan and Spanish school pupil still manages to put in significantly more hours than do pupils in some other European countries, ones in which the pupils perform far better than their Mallorcan counterparts.

The real education story, as I have mentioned before, is not the length of holidays, the school hours, or even the return to school, it is the rotten standard of public education in Mallorca and the Balearics.

Herr Bosch, Obermeisterführer for education in the Balearic Government, has spoken about increasing the number of school hours, but for now there are more pressing matters that he has to concern himself with. While he has also been speaking about “normality” existing as the new school year starts, there is the far from normal issue of what language should be used for teaching returning to the political curriculum. Far from normal, except in Mallorca.

In a widely publicised speech, the Balearics president, José Bauzá, has asserted, not for the first time, the claims of Castilian as “our language”. Bauzá, who has recently sprouted a beard in an act of facial-hair sympathy with his inglorious national leader, Mariano Rajoy, appears to be backtracking on what seemed a hard line against Catalan prior to the May regional elections. He is making more accommodating noises about Catalan, but will nevertheless have been bolstered by a declaration from the Catalonian supreme court that Catalonia has an obligation to incorporate the Castilian language as a vehicle for teaching.

Herr Bosch, meantime, has announced that, by the start of the next school year, there will be an equality between Catalan and Castilian in Mallorca’s educational system. So when the vuelta al cole occurs next September, things will be normal, if one accepts that there should be equality of the languages, abnormal if one doesn’t (either way) and almost certainly a lack of normality, because everyone will have been engaged in a full-on row about it between now and next September.

But we shouldn’t count against Bauzá and Bosch pressing further the claims of Castilian on the educational agenda over the next few months. The new model beardy Bauzá, who, with his growth, has managed to look more like Richard E. Grant than he did before, would very much prefer “Withnail y yo” to “Withnail i jo”.

The Catalan question aside, Bauzá has said that, under his Partido Popular party, education will get better. He would hardly say the opposite. But “educación, educación, educación” it is, and not “educació, educació, educació”. And on Monday all this education will be normal, except that little in the world of Mallorca’s education can be said to be normal.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

All That Noise: Back to school and beaches

Get a day of beach transcendence, such as yesterday, and you realise there is only one blemish. Other people. Sundays should be for highly vocalised church-going, leaving non-believers in sandy peace and quiet.

It was the last day of summer yesterday. Schools are back today. 12 September can normally be relied upon to unleash biblical weather. It did, but was an Araratian failure and a success of Eden, save for the great unwashed who came to take the waters.

September here and the British have largely fled, leaving the Mallorcans to attempt to stave off German sunbedsraum and for them to both compete in the sonorous league. Which is louder? A Mallorcan or a German? Teutonic volume should be a thing of research. There is no obvious explanation for it other than a direct correlation between size and loudness. The Mallorcan bellow, on the other hand, is easily understood; it has been genetically programmed in order to be heard over the thunderous growl of a “moto”. Smaller families have not eliminated another form of conditioning, that of feeling the need to shout to be heard.

The Mallorcan child’s noise does not seem to register with the Mallorcan child’s parent. It is fair to say that the child is also indulged. Today, a communal song and dance will be made about the return to school, while the cacophony on the streets will be matched only by the sound of heavy boots ensuring a smooth first day of the new school year. So much is made of the “vuelta al cole” that the press report the number of police being pressed into action to supervise it. One can only attribute the number of column inches to the fact that the summer holiday occupies a quarter of the year; the return is an event. There is even a whole website devoted to it.

To coincide with the vuelta, a survey has been conducted regarding issues in local education. The greatest concern involves discipline. It doesn’t come as a surprise. Kids are not out of control, but that parental indulgence translates itself into the classroom. More importantly, what one has is often the reverse of deprived conditions which lead to school indiscipline. The presence of a “class” of offspring of wealthy Mallorcans who come to appreciate that they need to do little but whose cups will still runneth over once they leave school, allied to that indulgence, creates its own lack of discipline. It’s a phenomenon that has been explained to me more than once by local teachers.

Back to school though means that the beaches will be quieter, the late summer sun can be enjoyed, until the torment of the stormy “tormenta” arrives, which it will. And then you won’t hear the shouts for the sound of the thunder.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.