Last May, a school in Leganés (Madrid) made headlines when its students did not show up for the mandatory exam called by the Department of Education of the Community of Madrid (officially called Test of Essential Skills and Knowledge) in order to “know the level of Madrid schoolchildren before starting secondary school.” In fact, according to Amaia Urriz, the center’s director, the teachers did not reject the test, but it was the parents who decided that no sixth-grade student would attend class that day.
This event would be nothing more than an anecdote if the Colegio Trabenco (TRAbajadores EN COmunidad – Workers in Community) were not a school with a truly unusual center project in the regulated educational landscape in Spain. It is worth browsing the school’s website, but as a sample of its pedagogical orientation, we are pasting a fragment of its presentation: “the school is a community, where the protagonists, students, teachers and families, participate actively. The objective of the school is oriented towards achieving a comprehensive education of schoolchildren, a constant professional development of teachers, and a cultural and human elevation of the neighborhood in which the Center is established.” You can also quickly read this article that appeared yesterday in the Madrid edition of El País.
What has most caught our attention about this matter, leaving aside the pedagogical, political and some aesthetic affinities (that chorus of ‘The Wall’!) with the center, is that it demonstrates how it is possible to dissent from the bureaucratic devices -and from certain social and political dynamics- that are assumed with greater or lesser coalescence as given in advance, thus provoking their naturalization. What better proof of this than the ‘exam’?
Since we carry out a good part of our projects in collaboration with schools, we usually reach a point during the work processes in which certain agents wield against some of our proposals, as a shield, one or another regulation regarding schedules, uses of space, the curriculum, the study plans… that under the guise of ‘technical’ decisions and requirements hide concrete political conceptions about education. At that moment, an arduous negotiation process begins that, depending on the degree to which the different agents, including the students themselves, embody or resist these conceptions, will come to a better or worse end. An antagonistic process that we have experienced intensely in recent weeks at the IES Joanot Martorell, where we started projecte3* at the beginning of the year and that we will explain in detail someday.