Bad manners
Rereading Oriol Bohigas, I found in his diaries a reference to his time at the mythical Institut-Escola. He recounts an anecdote that illustrates the civic spirit of that exemplary institution, which was meant to be the vanguard of republican educational change. The dictatorship destroyed it all. Damn authoritarian intolerance, which returns... Educational optimism, tinged with an essential veil of naivety, lay buried for decades. But we must also return to it. Urgently.
The anecdote Bohigas tells refers to a boy who, having just joined the institute, decided one day to spit on the ground in the middle of the paved courtyard. The matter reached the office of the director, the revered Dr. Estadella, who, incidentally, knew the names of all the children and greeted them personally every day, I don't recall now whether upon arrival or departure. What did Estadella do about that subversive spit? He called the firefighters, whose barracks were next door, to disinfect the entire courtyard. "I can still see the hoses unfurled and a deluge of water flooding everything. The lesson was absolute and, for all the students, of almost eternal effectiveness." And from the anecdote to the category: "A sublimation of a way of understanding pedagogy: shaming for lack of responsibility, instead of scolding for lack of obedience," writes Bohigas.
Today, I feel that neither shame nor scolding occurs. We live in careless and ill-mannered times. Just look at the pundit president Trump, a demented windbag, the classic schoolyard bully. Now a bully on a global geopolitical scale. If the most powerful man in the world behaves like this, with venomous words and sexist gestures of a neighborhood thug like he did with the NBC journalist, what can we expect?
When we talk about education – and we should talk about it a lot, shouldn't we? – we should go back to the common sense of civility. To recover that kind of loving enlightened pedagogical despotism that imbued the pioneers of a century ago, or of the 60s, when we started from very low and everything seemed possible. We should return to the intelligent exercise of wise and balanced authority, but authority after all. At school and at home. How do we get started, all together? It's easier said than done, of course.
Bad manners are not only the product of an educational system in crisis, but also of a society that has confused educating with overprotecting, a society that is not very demanding when it comes to children. It is not about returning to any Spartan harshness, but rather, for example, about being clear about the value of a no.
Two years younger than Bohigas, the pedagogue Jordi Cots (Barcelona, 1927), one of the "magnificent seven" who founded Rosa Sensat – also present, of course, was Marta Mata, whose birth centenary and 20th anniversary of death we are now celebrating – in his memoirs A life dedicated to children recalls his time in different schools. He didn't have Bohigas' luck. But he managed, and he completed his baccalaureate, already under the dictatorship, at the Institut Balmes, the oldest in Barcelona, where his classmates included Manolo Sacristán and Josep M. Castellet, and professors like the philosopher Joaquim Carreras Artau and Plato's translator Jaume Olives. Not bad. At university he would meet Josep M. Ainaud, Josep M. Espinàs, Antoni Tàpies, Francesc Casares, Carlos Barral, Alberto Oliart, Albert Manent, Enric Jardí... He studied law. Years later, he would tell "teachers and social workers, mostly idealists", that "law helps to understand reality". Down to earth. It suits us.
By the way, Cots and Bohigas, the latter at the wheel of a 600, one day in the late 1940s went to l'Escala to visit Víctor Català with Joaquim Molas and Joan Triadú, a good friend of Cots, who besides being a pedagogue was a poet, with Hölderlin as a reference. Years later Bohigas (MBM) would design the building for the Thau school, founded by Cots and Triadú. Cots was pushed towards pedagogy by Jaume Bofill – yes, the one from the Bofill Foundation, now Equitat.org –, a professor of metaphysics, who was convinced that "poets should be educators". And educators, people who live culture. Like those who founded Rosa Sensat half a century ago. Now it's time to refound education. Good education.