"God is dead", the question on the philosophy exam of the PAU coinciding with the Pope's visit

BarcelonaReligion and God are not only marking this Wednesday's news with the visit of Pope Leo XIV, but they have also made an appearance in this year's PAU philosophy exam. Students who chose this subject – the history test also took place first thing in the morning – had to analyze how the statement "God is dead" would be evaluated from the perspective of two prominent authors in the history of Western philosophy. "It was an easy question because we had all worked on it," a student from the Premià de Mar institute admitted as she left the exam at the UPF.

Beyond this exercise, the test included a fragment from The Republic by Plato and another from Creating Capabilities by Martha C. Nussbaum, the only female philosopher on the PAU syllabus. In fact, last year was the first time a woman appeared on the philosophy exam for the university entrance exams in Catalonia. In this exercise, many of the teenagers celebrated Plato's inclusion, saying he is the author "who is studied the most".

Finally, in the last exercise, students had to choose between evaluating two different texts. The first presented the idea that "there should be laws that limit the amount of goods that a certain person can accumulate," and the second posed scenarios such as whether "it is possible (although we cannot know for sure) that living conditions in thirty or forty years' time will be disastrous".

"We must let the men resolve the complications"

On the other hand, the role of women, trade unions, and the emigration of Andalusians to Catalonia have been the main themes of this year's university entrance exam in history. In the first exercise, students had to explain the role of women during the Second Republic and Franco's regime, based on two texts, also written by women: a speech by Clara Campoamor and one by Pilar Primo de Rivera. In the first, Campoamor claimed how women had also fought for the Republic and asked: "How can it be said that women have not fought and that they need an era, long years of the Republic, to demonstrate their capacity?".

In contrast, in the second speech, Pilar Primo de Rivera stated: "We must only attend to what corresponds to us, and we must let men, because it is up to them, resolve all the complications that the government of the nation entails". And she adds: "The women's sections must have, with respect to the leaders, an attitude of obedience and absolute subordination. Because this is always the role that corresponds to women in life, submission to men".

Trade unions and 23-F

In the second exercise, students could choose between writing a report for the CNT on the significance of social struggles in Spain from World War I to Primo de Rivera's coup d'état, or putting themselves in the shoes of a girl working for a bourgeois family in late 19th-century Barcelona and describing the social classes of the early years of the Restoration.

Regarding the "knowledge" exercises answered with multiple-choice questions, students had to imagine they were journalists for a Spanish television channel and had to interview a family that emigrated from Andalusia to Barcelona in the sixties, answering questions about shantytowns or the lack of housing due to the massive arrival of immigrants. On the other hand, they also had to put themselves in the shoes of a congressman who lived through February 23, 1981, precisely this year when Tejero has died and the documents of the coup d'état have been declassified. In this section, one of the questions is about the name of the coup d'état dismantled in 1978, and among the answers, the option "Operation Darth Vader" appeared.

Although many students explained that the history exam was "easy," they also criticized that the Civil War and Francoism "hardly" appeared, when "normally it always does."

At 12:00 PM, it will be the turn for electives in musical analysis, technical drawing applied to plastic arts and design, general sciences, Latin language and culture, and mathematics. In the afternoon, tests will be held in Catalan literature, biology, design, company operation and business model design, and technology and engineering.