Fiesta of Futility
It’s summer fiesta season here in Spain and in today’s Camino a Ítaca we look one of the most widely extended fiestas takes place, the Fiesta of Futility, the ‘oposiciones’. Click over to read the originally published piece in Spanish in the HOY the originally published piece in Spanish in the HOY or read the English translation below. (PDF en castellano abajo)
It’s that time of year
again. It’s when every town in the region gears up for their summer festivals.
And today one of the only festivals that encompasses the entire autonomous
community will take place. It’s the biannual, or in this case annual, Sisyphean
fiesta of futility.
It’s a fiesta that reenacts the Greek myth where
Sisyphus was condemned to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back
down again, incessantly having to repeat this pointless task for eternity in
Hades.
In what is perhaps the
biggest waste of time and energy that this country ever produces, today thousands
of opositores for education will sit their meaningless exam in the hope of
securing one of the few plazas on offer this year.
And it makes no sense at
all.
Yet it’s something so
accepted by the educational community that these exams are something akin to
the sun rising in the East, something immutable, unchangeable and permanent.
Yet in few other country
in the world do public systems choose their teachers in this manner. In other
countries, like my native Canada, teachers are chosen on their merit and their
ability to teach, not their ability to memorize 69 topics on various subjects, many
of which have absolutely nothing to do with teaching.
In other countries
teachers apply for jobs just as they would any other job and they are hired if
the school considers them the right fit for the job or not. And after a trial
period, and as with other jobs, if they aren’t the right fit, they are asked to
leave.
Yet here in Spain teachers
aren’t chosen on their merits or their abilities as teachers. They are chosen
on their ability to memorize this enormous list. If you take a secondary
English teacher for example, some of the more useless topics include the
history of the Norman conquest, the socioeconomic development of Great Britain
in the XVIII century and the historical evolution of the United States.
This means that the person
chosen to teach our children may have been able to memorize the names of every
president of the United States but may only have a tenuous understanding of
things like second language acquisition theory, how to motivate teenagers or
even have the vocation for teaching. Yet, once they pass the exam they have a
job for life. It’s like the administration is at odds with itself, not trusting
their own universities to train their prospective teachers adequately.
Even if they do pass the
impracticable exam, they may not even get a position and the boulder rolls down
the hill. Rather than devoting their time and energy on training, mentoring,
class planning and working to become better professionals, these poor
Sisypheans are doomed to return to studying the useless topics for their next
opportunity at the exam and may lose a decade or more of time which could have
been better employed at becoming better teachers.
If the administration is truly
interested in bettering our education system, it’s time to stop obsessing about
the curriculum and take a deep look at how those who impart it are chosen.
