The teachers

We read in ARA Balears a testimony from this extraordinary series, My School Years, which reconstructs, decade by decade, the school of those of us who are older today, with teachers who no longer exist. Antoni Vidal, born in 1963, says: “A classmate with a facial deformity, who spoke with difficulty, was ridiculed by the principal in front of the whole class. He asked him if he had finished selling lottery tickets. No one laughed. The silence was more eloquent than any laughter”.

I looked closely, some time ago, at Goya’s painting – today in the Aljafería Palace – called The lesson comes with blood, because I am convinced that no, no, it does not come with blood. The lesson with blood only comes out. It is a desolate painting, which conveys dirt, disorder, pain, and which explains to those who justify or justified physical punishment. One of the stories that has most impressed me in life is Galloping Foxley, by Roald Dahl, about the abuse of older students towards younger ones. In real life, I met a teacher who humiliated some female students. How easy it is to humiliate children and adolescents, right? How cheap. I told that woman one thing: “You don’t think about it now, but these girls will one day be women, and these women will never forget you”.

There is one thing in the testimony we are considering, however, that has made me reflect. There were no laughs, he says. There was an eloquent and brave silence. I am not entirely sure that this, the absence of laughter, the quiet complicity, the solidarity of equals, would happen everywhere today. Perhaps today no teacher would laugh at anyone’s appearance, but I’m not sure some classmates wouldn’t laugh, with the complicity or connivance of some of their parents. The private jokes of those who complain that now you can’t say anything, how frightening they are, because they always go in one direction: appearance.