Spain’s Caste System: A Fairy Tale in Uniform

Do you ever wonder how fairy tales survive—or crumble—when they’re dressed in uniform? In my latest Camino a Ítaca column for HOY, I explore exactly that: how the stories we inherit transform when they’re repackaged by institutions, power, or conformity.

I reflect on the tension between imagination and order, and trace how even the most magical narratives can be twisted—or redeemed—by the forces that govern us. It’s a meditation on myths, memory, and what we choose to believe when the costumes change.

If you’re someone who cares about stories, identity, and the hidden logic behind the tales we tell ourselves, this column is for you. Give it a read here, and join me every other week as we walk together Camino a Ítaca—to question, to imagine, and to rediscover. Read the English version below or click over to read the original version in Spanish in the HOY. (PDF en castellano abajo)

Spain’s Caste System: A Fairy Tale in Uniform

Troy Nahumko

All good things must come to an end—summer holidays, childhood innocence, and the bedtime story that our ‘leaders’ believe in equality. The break is over, alarm clocks return to their sadism, and children all across Spain trudge toward their respective schools—plural. Not “school” in the lofty sense of a shared civic institution, but schools in that idiosyncratic Spanish sense: velvet ropes and bouncers, admitting children not for their talent or curiosity but by the depth of their parents’ wallet, the thickness of their Rolodex or the medieval rigidity of their views on gender and sin.

Now, I made a deliberate point of saying schools—plural. Not because I’m a lazy language learner tripping over Spanish grammar, but because Spain doesn’t have a school system, it has a caste system with homework. Roughly a third of Spanish students live in a kind of taxpayer-subsidized gated community for children, the concertadas. These aren’t solely Eton-like playgrounds for the super-rich where Álvaro learns dressage, sailing, and how to shout at the help in the future perfect tense. No, they’re a state-funded shadow realm, mostly run by people convinced equality is a communist fever dream and that women should be grateful for their ribcage origins.

The results are catastrophic, and well-documented: middle- and upper-income families peel away into these semi-private sanctuaries while public schools are left carrying a wildly disproportionate load of vulnerable students. According to Save the Children (yes, the children), the socioeconomic gap between public and concertada alone explains 21% of all school segregation in Spain— perhaps the worst in the developed world. That’s not a glitch in the system; that is the system. Private schools, in this sense, are like live-action algorithms: they curate your child’s feed in real time, scrubbing away the inconvenient realities of poverty, disability, or difference. Society, with all its mess and texture, is just a blurred background.

Here in Andalucía the numbers bleed. 2,400 public classrooms shut under Moreno Bonilla. Meanwhile, the concertadas waltz off with €72 million in new subsidies. Special needs funding slashed and shrugged off as “overprotection of the only child.” And down in Cádiz, prosecutors pull €300,000 in fake bus invoices straight out of the Junta’s filing cabinet. Less public, more private. Less for the vulnerable, more for the velvet-rope crowd. And if you think this carnival of neglect stops in the Sierra Morena, look at Extremadura: 5,000 kids stranded, 223 school routes abandoned, transport companies refusing to bid not once, not twice, but ten times. The Junta’s solution? Threaten those same companies to drive the buses anyway. Equality on wheels—powered by blackmail.

And you might think this was just the Right’s indulgence, the ones who never made peace with church-state separation and treat Leviticus as a policy guide. But no—the King’s own spawn didn’t mix with us plebes, and a roll call of PSOE grandees send their kids to schools “inspired by the Gospels” and have no issue with these having jobs not available to women.

Here the hypocrisy curdles. The same politicians who thunder from podiums about defending public education—Irene Montero and her partner among them—chauffeur their own children through the private gates. “Do as I say, not as I enroll.”

As the New York Times recently noted, “It is sometimes considered gauche to give words the weight of their meaning.” Spain has turned this into an art form. Equality here is a costume rented for rallies and hashtags. The fairy tale ends as it always does: the princes live happily ever after, and the rest are left waiting at the bus stop.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xorTa8q8qB6qaMPr5yNZ8RdxJRJ7GC15/preview