The school year begins, and with it, families set in motion an almost perfect machinery: the fashionable backpack, the wonderfully covered books, schedules squared to the millimeter, and WhatsApp groups in full swing. We try to anticipate everything so that our children begin school calmly and without difficulties. But, sometimes, in this legitimate attempt to protect them, we are literally leaving them unprotected, because we eliminate what will help them most to become strong: the small daily setbacks. The start of the school year is a magnificent moment to train resilience, especially when they haven't gotten the teacher they expected, or their best friend is in another class, or everyone says it will be a complicated year.

A high-mountain journey as a routine gesture to get to school. In isolated indigenous communities, the right to education is measured in kilometers of mud, rivers without safe crossings, and paths with dangerous terrain. Meanwhile, classrooms endure in precarious conditions, sustained by teachers who multiply resources where public investment arrives late or only halfway, and families convinced that taking their children to school is both a right and an obligation. Every day is an epic, a reflection of a structural gap: the physical distance between remote areas and opportunities. What real options do children have when the first obstacle is the environment itself? This photo essay focuses on the determination of the families and the slowness of the solutions that puts the children of the Ngäbe-Buglé comarca, in western Panama, near the border with Costa Rica, at risk.

The diversity we find in the classrooms of educational centers is a reflection of the society in which we live. However, in these contexts, this plurality is not defined only by different social and geographical realities or backgrounds, but also by the skills, aptitudes, attitudes, and learning rhythms of each student. Good classroom management requires taking this diversity into account at all levels, although, in some cases, the lack of resources or other situations that may arise lead to solutions that can affect this heterogeneity to a greater or lesser degree.

Orelletes is a rabbit who is starting preschool (I3) and experiences it with the same intensity as many children who are entering a school for the first time. He cries, he doesn't like saying goodbye to his parents, he finds it hard to share toys, and he prefers to play alone, so he hides in a corner. With a lot of tact, the teacher helps him to breathe, to be calm, and he ends up joining the circle with the rest of the group. He is the protagonist of Orelletes at school, a story that aims to help experience this process from a kinder and more conscious space. Self-published by preschool teacher Meritxell Casanova, the story empathizes with the child and gives advice to parents to make these first weeks of schooling easier.

Well, that's it. This week we are going back to school and even though, for the sake of appearances, teachers and students keep saying "how lazy we are and how little desire we have," the reality is that we are always excited (even if just a little bit) to start over. Starting a new school year is like falling in love again: new clothes, organizing plans, the desire to do it well. This year, yes.

Mònica Bernabé is one of the European journalists who best knows Afghanistan. She first went there in 2000, during the first Taliban regime, lived there between 2006 and 2014, and has returned on several occasions, the last one this August 2026, when it has been five years since the withdrawal of American troops. We speak with her about what she has seen, what they have told her, and how she has disguised herself to be able to narrate the reality of Taliban Afghanistan, a regime that does not want foreign journalists and makes it difficult to report on what is happening in the country.

The author Regina Rodríguez Sirvent has become one of the most powerful and fun voices in Catalan literature. After the phenomenon of Les calces al sol with more than 100,000 copies sold, she is now releasing Crispetes de matinada, in which her childhood friends are crucial characters and play a decisive role in the novel's plot. Because when Regina talks about her time at school, her first thought goes directly to her friends. “School is the foundation of my deepest friendships, it's the most important thing that happened to me and I keep all my school friends. With my friends, we have been very daring and very mischievous. We even opened the teachers' lounge to look for our grades, add extra positives, and we even photocopied exams!”

Mari Pau Huguet (Estopanyà, 1963) is known for a professional life dedicated to Televisió de Catalunya. There she began her career and very likely it is also there where she will end it. But few know that she spent her entire childhood in the La Bordeta neighbourhood of Lleida. These were the sixties and seventies of the last century, when everything still happened in the street. “It was like living in a village, we didn't have a television and we spent the day playing outside the house,” recalls the journalist. These were times when she socialised with both boys and girls in all sorts of popular games, “like rope skipping, the handkerchief game and strong horse...”, she remembers.

It was during the pandemic that Núria Casas installed the TikTok app and dared to make videos caricaturing different types of mothers, teachers, or comparisons about how school was a few years ago and how it is now. A direct and realistic format that has connected enormously with the public and has become her current job as a content creator.

Many know the incredible story of overcoming of the Lleida pilot Isidre Esteve who, after becoming paraplegic from a motorcycle accident in 2007, it was transformed into a regular competitor in car rally raids, especially at the Dakar. But few know that his childhood in his native Oliana (in the Alt Urgell region) was crucial in forging a personality based on effort and respect for teachers and parents.

The crisis in education in Catalonia not only has consequences today. If the degradation continues, the country condemns itself to a future of economic irrelevance and social fracture.

There is no doubt that summer is a time for rest and disconnection. The heat does not help with work, and studying while friends are at the pool is a more than complicated challenge, especially when there are no retakes in September. But if there are suspended (not achieved) subjects in the report cards and you want to start the course better than you finished it, many families consider combining the necessary rest and disconnection with this "catching up". How many hours should be dedicated each day? A private tutor or should we let them do it freely? Should other summer activities be given up? We talk to the managers of L’Acadèmia, a study center in Mollerussa that accompanies students all year round but which also has its doors open in the summer for all those families who find themselves in similar situations.

Most children stop using daytime diapers between the ages of two and four, although nighttime training can be more difficult and may not be completed until around five or six years of age. For Alejandra Pérez, supervisor of pediatrics and neonatology at Sant Pau Campus Salut Barcelona, it is key to understand that sphincter control is not a habit learned through repetition, "but rather a maturational milestone acquired when the child's body is physiologically, cognitively, and emotionally ready." Neurologically, Pérez continues, "it involves a transition from an involuntary reflex action (where the bladder empties automatically) to a voluntary and conscious act under cortical control." Forcing this process prematurely, therefore, "is ineffective and can generate frustration, anxiety, and unnecessary conflicts, as each child has their own pace of nervous system maturation."

For days we have been living with this sticky heat. That puts us in a bad mood. That makes our children (and teachers, and monitors, and people who work in educational centers) finish the course inside boiling classrooms. The platform has denounced it Classrooms on Fire, and by moving its map of Catalonia you can see high school classrooms that reached 39 degrees. Also a chilling string of classes that have surpassed the legal limit, which states that “The temperature of the premises where sedentary work typical of offices or similar is carried out shall be between 17 and 27 degrees”. And the course has already ended and we seem to forget about it, but it shouldn't be like that.

Another course is ending. June is an intense month for teachers, many topics need to be closed and we carry accumulated fatigue. Irritable students, final recoveries, tutoring reports, final exams and a lot of heat. These are days for making memories and putting down in writing all that we have experienced. I look back and I am left with five things that have happened this course: We have returned to writing by hand. My colleague Cristian Olivé said it in an Instagram post: “AI has become the most dangerous tool in classrooms”. In order to avoid it and prevent it from completely killing creativity, I have had to dedicate entire classes to writing in the classroom and ask for writings that can be started and finished in an hour. I have avoided assigning digital work and have insisted that everything be submitted handwritten because handwriting helps to fix ideas. I myself prefer to make handwritten lists of pending tasks rather than on my mobile, because when I transfer it to paper everything looks clearer and less burdensome. Talk, talk, and talk. The AI tsunami in education has made oral presentations fundamental for assessing a topic. I'm at a point where I no longer even ask for digital support (like Canva), because it ended up becoming a reading of what ChatGPT had created. You know that teenagers save more words and avoid calls more and more, and I've noticed a decline in communicative ability. That's why I'm also a big proponent of not cutting short conversations that arise in the classroom and letting students express themselves even if it's not strictly about the lesson. The questions or interests that arise spontaneously are unrepeatable and make that class unique. Perhaps I'm romanticizing the Socratic method, but I believe there's nothing more powerful than a good conversation. Reading in the age of screens. I have noticed a growth in the number of student readers. I believe we can now banish the refrain that says young people don't read, because I increasingly see teenagers reading between classes and even during recess. At first, I found it unprecedented and rubbed my eyes as if it were a miracle; now I'm used to it. I have also seen another change in the use of mobile phones in secondary school. At my school, every morning students must leave their phones in a drawer, and we return them at the end of the day. In all the years I was a tutor in 1st year of ESO, the drawer was quite full, but for a couple of years now, the situation has declined significantly, and this year I only kept eight phones in the drawer. I believe we are all educating more consciously and responsibly about the proper use of screens.Graduations have gotten out of hand. Here I open a can of worms that might be worth a whole article, but I find the topic of graduations very exaggerated. I'm not saying they shouldn't be celebrated, mind you? It's an important milestone, especially in the second year of high school, but all these identical dresses, in bright colors and designed for normative bodies, make me reflect a lot on the aesthetic pressure (which falls on them) and on the Americanization of this act. The dining hall as an educational tool.Graduations have gotten out of hand.Many times I am asked if I don't get tired of explaining the same thing, but you can see that each course is different, and new challenges always arise that make it a changing and chameleonic job. Teachers, it has been an especially intense course, and from here I send you infinite gratitude for the commitment and vocation you have. You can already see the light at the end of the tunnel. Rest a lot.

The school year ends and the closest horizon for students is the summer holidays, but a little further ahead, as the calendar progresses, there is the start of a new school year in September and meeting up with friends again. Taking a step forward and, in some cases, changing stages. But there are a few students for whom these holidays will only be the prelude to Groundhog Day, as they finish the school year knowing that the next one they will return to the same classroom, the same subjects, the same teachers, but with different classmates. While, years ago, it was a reality that was rarely questioned, now many variables are considered before making a student repeat a year. In fact, in Catalonia, it is only applied in studied and exceptional cases and when it has been proven to be the most beneficial option for the student.

The streets are full of "The dignity of education", written on huge banners. This is what the demonstrations and teachers' strikes are demanding. The resounding no to the agreement reached by the union representatives, with the loud booing of the representative to tell her "We are the ones who are in the classroom" and "It was not a matter of salary", reveals to us the moment we are in. No, it wasn't about working conditions alone, because what teachers want is to be able to exercise their profession properly. They have said it very clearly: well-being is not solely a matter of working conditions; what is being claimed is to exercise the profession with dignity.The teacher unrest is now compounded by a fracture in union representation. Who represents the teachers? Jordi Muñoz's analysis is very accurate regarding the loss of institutional mediations, which in the case of education translates into a crisis of the school itself as an institution: when the classic forms of representation and conflict management falter, the school's capacity to sustain a shared framework of meaning, authority, and professional trust also becomes more fragile. Jordi Muñoz's analysis regarding the loss of institutional mediations, which in the case of education translates into a crisis of the school itself as an institution: when the classic forms of representation and conflict management falter, the school's capacity to sustain a shared framework of meaning, authority, and professional trust also becomes more fragile.

My son doesn't want to play football. Said like that, it seems an insignificant sentence. But, in reality, it is a profoundly political sentence. Because in many schools, even today, not wanting to play football is equivalent to placing oneself outside the center of childhood masculinity. And this has social, emotional, and identity consequences that adults often minimize because we have normalized a structure that we consider "natural" when, in fact, it is cultural and profoundly exclusionary.The problem is not football. Football is a collaborative, physical and creative game. The problem is its cultural monopoly within male childhood. The problem is when it stops being an option and becomes an implicit social obligation. When it starts to function as a mechanism of hierarchization and belonging to the group. When the schoolyard is organized around a single activity that occupies the central space and knowing the names of players, teams and transfers becomes a kind of mandatory male literacy. The child who does not participate in this code is immediately perceived as strange.In many schools, a scene is still repeated that we should look at critically, which is that of boys occupying the center of the playground with football and girls being relegated to the margins. It is a profoundly ideological distribution of space. The center belongs to the male competitive game and the periphery is reserved for activities considered secondary. And it is even more serious when boys who do not fit into this footballing masculinity end up being expelled from the dominant group.It is inevitable to recall Pierre Bourdieu here, who explained how many forms of domination do not function through explicit prohibitions but through the naturalization of habits. The schoolyard is a perfect example, as it is the place where children learn, without anyone verbalizing it, what type of masculinity is valued and what is marginal. Whoever masters this language gains recognition and centrality; whoever does not share it is displaced. Michel Foucault also insisted that power acts through daily micro-practices that shape behaviors. No one formally forces children to play football, but collective pressure produces a subtle, enormously effective discipline.

The end of the school year is approaching, and with it, a scene that repeats in many homes with school-aged children: they arrive with various – if not many – crafts they've made at school, in after-school activities... And the questions return: what should we do with all this? Do we keep it all? Do we throw it all away? Do we leave it at home and gradually discard it after a few days without the children noticing?

"Too much vegetable protein", "Excess legumes", "What do we do about sugar?" The menus served in schools – in accordance with regulations and under nutritional criteria – generate a disparity of opinions among families. In Catalonia, 49.5% of children use the school canteen service, according to data from the Program for the Review of School Menus of Catalonia (PReME), based on the centers evaluated. Some schools have their own kitchens and others are supplied by companies that serve them meals. The objective is, in all cases, to offer menus adapted to needs, whether medical or for religious or moral reasons, which go beyond food: sufficient time to eat in peace – if the din allows – added to a care service before and after sitting at the table.