The school, in the foreground

On Wednesday nights, TV3 viewers go back to school. The channel has premiered School Stories, a documentary series that delves into the realities of teachers and students at various primary, secondary, and vocational schools. The format is inspired by the prolific French tradition of documentaries exploring the field of education. The influence of productions such as three you have (Nicolas Philibert, 2002), The class. Between the walls (Laurent Cantet, 2008), The Court of Babel (Julie Bertuccelli, 2014) and many others, showing the difficulty in motivating students, the tensions within the educational system or the challenges of cultural diversity in the classroom. School Stories It dispenses with a narrator and interviews. It limits itself to a full observation of the school's reality. It eschews the general plan to prioritize the first plan, seeking a more human approach. The aim is not to recount the concrete but to penetrate the emotional spectrum and empathize with the protagonists. Teachers and students are observed as participants in an ecosystem in crisis, and their interactions and reactions serve to explain its underlying causes. The camera focuses on glances, silences, moods, attitudes, and conversations. The first chapter, at the Rocagrossa Institute in Lloret de Mar, begins with the debate over regulating cell phone use, one of the major issues in education. As the story progresses, new conflicts arise and the narrative tension increases. Micky, the social integration specialist, becomes the common thread in his role as mediator. The heated discussion between students during the Spanish class symbolically took us to another television reality that the protagonists know very well: boys and girls argued with each other like the participants of a reality. And it is that in School Stories You see much more than what is included in the image, and it explains much more than what the characters verbalize. You capture all the social and cultural background that shapes their reality. This delicate setting is a reflection of social circumstances brewing outside of school. There's no need to go into detail, just intuit them, so that each individual case, each problem, is an example of a global reality.

It's very difficult to determine how the presence of the cameras may have influenced the protagonists' behavior. It's also difficult to determine whether the final writing exercise to reduce the students' emotional aggression is induced by the program or a recurring solution from the school itself.

With School StoriesBeyond remaining with a condescending and condescending view of the educational reality, or with passive pessimism, the program will be useful to the extent that it is able to stimulate social debate and reflect the system's needs that are not being addressed. Because the desire to document reality in schools must be linked to an interest in the process of building citizenship. Observing younger generations is an exercise in catching a glimpse of the problems of the future.