Opus Dei, the CiU and education

In the last couple days there’s been a lot of talk from the new education minister about potentially allowing for the segregation of girls and boys in state-funded education.

I don’t really see a lot of demand from parents for this and I wonder whether this is really just a back-door way to allow more Opus Dei schools (which segregate by sex) into the state funded system.

Ten years ago, the CiU allowed a dozen (mainly Opus Dei) schools into the state-funded system, but during the tri-partite years, no new schools were allowed in (despite a massive growth of Opus Dei membership).

Funnily enough, the central government is currently pushing a new law that would explicitly outlaw state funding to any school that discriminates by sex. Looks like at least in Asturias, the press figured out who they really are after.

At the same time, the Spanish Supreme Court is trying to decide a case about whether Opus Dei schools should be denied state funding based on violation of the constitution.

Complaints about my complaining

On some rare occasions I have the urge to complain about something that I don’t like about Catalunya. Invariable I get a comment along the lines of “If you don’t like it, then why don’t you move somewhere else?”

Why are people complaining about my complaining? If I can't pseudo-anonymously complain on my own blog, what's the point of it all?

Well, if we really hated it here, we wouldn’t be here. There’s many things on the positive side, including two great jobs and living in one the best cities in the world.

The problem is that many ex-pats that move here don't know how long they are going to be here for. Expecting them to immediately commit to have their kids immersed in a language that is totally useless outside a very small region of Europe is crazy.

From our kids perspective, we’ve already paid the price for living here. It was a year of hell for the kids, during which they weren’t able to participate in class and their self-esteem suffered a lot.

But now our kids are fine with Catalan, Spanish and English. The younger one is even starting to speak Spanish with a pretty heavy Catalan accent at home and says "voila" and "eh" all the time.

Tot Sant Cugat interchange

The local magazine, Tot Sant Cugat, has a cute interchange section called “La paradeta” (the stall) where people offer something in exchange for something else. This week:

Necessito una cadireta de cotxe per un nen de 18 kg. Ofereixo un pastis bonissim!

I need a car seat for a child of 18 kg. I offer you a yummy cake!

Weekend excursion in Sant Cugat: Calçots at Can Borrell

If it’s a sunny Sunday in winter, you can find half of Sant Cugat along the trail to have lunch or breakfast at Masia Can Borrell, which is about 2.5 km walk from the roundabout near the Europa School. It’s a nice “starter” hike if your kids aren’t used to it. Ours whined for the first 100m or so, but once they realized we weren’t turning around they started to have fun.

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Make sure you have reservations, and it’s best to arrive early for lunch (1:30) otherwise the food can take a while. You can also have breakfast from 10-12.

Calçots are a type of green onion typical to this region that is roasted and eaten with a special salvitxada sauce. The usual season is February-March, but you can find them in many places starting in January.

It’s a very messy affair, so you get a bib and plastic gloves to help you out. The procedure is like this: first take off the outer shell (which usually pretty burnt from the bbq), then hold it at one end, dip it into the sauce and the lower it into your mouth from above. Lots of fun for adults and kids alike.

Catalan Politicians

As much as I like to complain about language politics, I have to say that as a whole, politicians in Catalunya still seem to be relatively idealistic and seem to actually care about affecting what they think are positive chances in society.

They are also remarkably poor. Outgoing Montilla was worth about 365,000 euros and incoming Artur Mas clocked in around 502,000 euros. (There is always the question of undeclared or wifely assets, but none of these politicians leads a particularly extravagant lifestyle.) In the US it would be unusual for a successful politician at the governor level not to be a multi-millionaire.

This is also in remarkable contrast to many other parts of Spain, such as Madrid, Andalucía, and Valencia, where the political class seems to exists primarily as a way to flow government money and favors to the richest and most connected.

One loosely connected anecdote: I recently went on a tour of the super-computer Mare Nostrum, where one of the applications they were showing was a collaboration with the Generalitat on modeling pollution in Barcelona.

The contrast with Madrid couldn’t be more pronounced. After numerous complaints at the EU level, Madrid solved its pollution problem by moving the measuring machines to less polluted locations.

What happens to the Euro?

One of the best articles I’ve read so far about what is likely to happen in the Euro-zone over the next couple years.

The “easy” solution is to hope that economic growth will raise all boats and that eventually the debts will become manageable.

If this doesn't work out, then solving the problem is a political, not an economic issue. How will the pain of adjustment be shared? Each solution (default, leaving the euro, inflation, raising taxes, austerity, etc) assigns costs to a different group.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t “win/win” solutions to this problem, but these all require a high level of trust and co-operations. Germany has been fundamentally unhelpful in this aspect, a large part due to the lack of leadership of Merkel. She has repeatedly placed narrow domestic political calculations (remember how she let the Greek crisis fester for weeks because she had a regional election to worry about?) ahead of finding pan-European solutions.

Eight Global Cities: Sant Cugat?

Rather impressed by the Living Labs recent choice for digital service innovation, where Barcelona, Cape Town, Eindhoven, Lagos, San Francisco, Sant Cugat, Stockholm and Taipei were chosen to select companies and organizations that have developed digital services to help their citizens. Nice going!

The somewhat sad resolution to our own school bullying case

Our older son was pretty miserable last year due to two kids that would continually taunt him during recess. He was continuously stressed out and suffered from very low self-esteem. We were considering changing schools, but first wanted to make sure that we helped him with his issues so that the next school wouldn’t have the same problem.

This year school has been great and our son is super happy and hasn’t complained about bullying at all. We asked him the other day why they weren’t bullying him anymore and his answer was “There’s a new Chinese kid in our class and the bullies bother him now.”

I think one of the reasons that Spain is far behind the curve on dealing with school bullying is twofold: first, it’s a society that has a very strong group instinct. My guess is that in order to develop such a strong group feeling, non-conformists need to be punished and humiliated. In North America, this would probably be considered psychological bullying. Here it’s called “formación del grupo”.

Secondly, the US has had some incredibly tragic events (such as the Columbine massacre), which caused many school to implement and fund anti-bullying policies, such as the Olweus program:

One of the largest of these initiatives is the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program, which has been implemented in several thousand U.S. schools. It is a comprehensive program that includes forming an anti-bullying committee, training staff to intervene immediately if they observe bullying and meeting with students and parents when problems occur.

In fact, a recent study showed that the percentage of kids who reported being physically bullied in the US declined from 22% in 2003 to 15% in 2008.