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SuperNova said: -snip- |
I did say that education needs a revamp, but most of this reads as in your boyfriend really had bad luck choosing his school. I'm from the same place that he is (not the school, but the island), and I can attest most of what I previously stated.
History and essays are a mandatory part of everyone's education here. They're unavoidable subjects (the later is an extention of Spanish classes), and most people can agree schools here suck balls, but mainly because of lack of discipline and terrible organization, maybe disinterested teachers at times; not lack of things to study. My Spanish History teacher in high school used to add geographical maps in exams to stimulate the knowledge of Geography as well since it's something most students drop off from as soon as possible. My philosophy teacher in high school, whom I have in great regards, basically made an entire class of rebel assholes (namely us) listen to Philosophy classes with passion. All the Spanish teachers I've had have greatly contributed to make us develop critical thinking (they're probably one important reason why the idea of becoming a writer grew on me), and the only time I've felt like someone imposed his ideals was during Ethics, mainly because we somehow got assigned a teacher that didn't care at all for the subject (yes, that does happen). I came from one of the most atrocious high-schools ever made, from design itself (good job whoever thought the doors should lead straight to a standard car road with very little sidewalk that doesn't prevent child stampede when it's break time) to management and teachers.
Critical thinking is required if you expect to get good scores during Selectivity, which enables you to access certain universities. Admittely, some degrees require less (or just the average) score, but it should lie in the student's ambition to try and achieve the best he can. I can't, obviously, extrapolate everything to my advantage either, as I'm probably aware there's plenty of teachers that merely relay the information in the books and don't bother going futher beyond these. Syntax is a waste because no teacher finds a purpose for it to be explained. It's basically handbook methodology, and when the children aren't given a reason why that is, then it becomes meaningless for them. Which in essence makes it boring and useless.
Chairs and tables, again, have no design whatsoever. They're 1-1 row in some places out of convenience for space, but I've been in all kind of chair-distributed rooms from school to university (I remember one that had all the chairs glued, and if you basically sat down in the middle, you would have to force half of the people sitting down wake up in order to allow you to leave). One of our classes was U shaped, and in university we basically had to go loot chairs and tables from other classrooms because we didn't have enough in our assigned one. If there's any remnant of symbology there, it's lost forever to design incompetence, not a hidden message that no one can understand anymore.
Blind and patriotic people are everywhere, and I've met my fair share of people like this as well. I just wanted to point out that regardless of the terrible luck your boyfriend had, History is a mandatory subject that technically has to cover from the Borbon dynasty to the Transition to Democracy, and that essays are mandatory part of most, if not all, language/spanish classes; universities might rather choose a different model because it suits them better. Those are the claims you made that I completely disagree with.
I don't disagree the model with Germany is different and that there's some retarded things here, like having to pay for public university (like what the fuck), I'm just saying you're extrapolating his experience and this anecdotal evidence of blind patriotism from some people to the entirety of Spain's education, which is simply not the case of how the educational system, no matter how terrible and in need of a revamp is, works right now. Some other people in this thread have also quoted you disagreeing with the claims, which I don't intend to use as evidence or anything, but I just wanna highlight them mainly because I think they too think like me; terrible educational system, but that doesn't push fascism claims or symbology onto students in its majority. Mostly just an educational system that sucks.
