TV3 enters the classroom with 'School Stories', a harrowing portrait of education in the country.

BarcelonaThere are few spaces as delicate as schools, micro-universes fraught with challenges, miracles, misery, perseverance, and even conflict, where the most innocent and vulnerable—children—are at the center of the equation. TV3 wanted to take a look at this, and this Wednesday (10:00 p.m.) it premiered School Stories, a six-episode docuseries airing on prime time to take over from Card gameThe work arrives with the signature of Pol Izquierdo as director, a veteran of the house and author of non-fiction series that made a fortune such as Airport, Emergencies or the most recent Elementary School Stories.

Each episode delves into a specific school—primary, secondary, or vocational training—to show us its reality: the result is a kaleidoscope of unique features, ranging from a rural school to a highly complex school with over a thousand students. In fact, one of the central ideas of the series is that there is a tremendous diversity of experiences for Catalan students and that, in the educational world, the territorial imbalance is much more evident, for example, than in the healthcare system. The featured schools are the Rocagrossa Institute in Lloret de Mar, the Samuntada School in Sabadell, the Mercè Rodoreda School in the Trinidad neighborhood of Barcelona, ​​​​the Llobera School in Solsonès, the Santa Coloma School in Ger de Cerdanya, and the Pía School in Mataró. The team filmed for ten days at each school.

"Of all the series I've directed, this is by far the most complex. And the one in which I've most felt my duty of responsibility, honesty, and integrity," Pol Izquierdo explained in conversation with ARA. School Stories is the obvious heir ofElementary School StoriesBut in this case, the form has been more refined and voice-overs or interviews have been completely dispensed with: the entire footage is based on spontaneous filming of moments and conversations between different members of the educational community, from students to teachers, including management staff and families.

"We wanted the interpretation of the series to be a little freer and offer an enjoyment more similar to that experienced when watching a film," says Izquierdo. "For example, during many chapters the dominant angle is the short angle, not the general angle. And that's because the short angle increases the feeling of being inside the classroom. We want it to be that way. The main difficulty of this methodology is that the sensations—of loneliness, of exhaustion...—must be suggested with the resources of audiovisual language, without the crutch of direct declaration. In one of the sequences, we see the first day of a girl who has just arrived from Senegal, halfway through the year. All her classmates enter the classroom and sit where they belong, but she remains stuck in the doorway, and the image becomes a symbol of the difficulty newcomers have in integrating into the dynamics already underway in the classroom.

The series has its shining moments, but also others of great hardship. Izquierdo admits that she can be "claustrophobic" at times, and thanks the television executives for allowing them to adopt this format, directly inspired by the French film The classA paradigmatic example of this approach is the conversation between four girls, who, while putting on makeup in the locker room, speak with complete frankness about the sexism they suffer daily, with derogatory comments about their bodies or about whether they are promiscuous.

A close-up portrait

Despite its testimonial value, the series does not aspire to make a diagnosis of the educational system as such, nor is it filmed as a manifesto. "We don't make any value judgments," Izquierdo argues. "What we've done is honestly and silently portray what happens in schools. It's as if we were wearing an invisibility cloak. Now, having said that, everyone on the team agrees that we've never suffered so much, and the portrayal of adolescents is very distressing, because it is very distressing." The historical moment is also doubly complicated. According to one of the teachers featured, the far right has entered the school and has begun to infiltrate some of the male students with its arguments regarding the perception of women.

Another difference that the series director has observed regarding Elementary School Stories It's the status of teachers. "We're in a very difficult time," he says. "We've come from years of disinvestment in areas like health and education. But I, having done a few series about doctors, can say that the social profile of doctors is always good. On the other hand, that of teachers is always bad, and we constantly question them. There are teachers."

In this sense, Izquierdo laments "the situations of abandonment, misery, and professional burnout, which cannot be allowed at the most important foundation when it comes to building a country." And he concludes: "The reality of the country we have is not what we imagined. It's what is seen in schools. And we must take care of these people." In this sense, the screenwriter and director recalls an interview with Pasqual Maragall on Catalunya Ràdio in which he was asked what his three priorities would be as president. The answer was unequivocal: "Education, education, and education."