"God is dead" the question of the PAU philosophy exam 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 have also made an appearance in this year's PAU philosophy exam. Students who chose this subject —the history test was also held 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," admitted a student from the Premià de Mar institute as she left the exam at the UPF.

Beyond this exercise, the exam included a fragment from Plato's Republic and another from Martha C. Nussbaum's Creating Capabilities, the only female philosopher included in the PAU syllabus. In fact, last year was the first time a woman appeared in the Catalan university entrance exam's philosophy paper. In this exercise, many of the adolescents 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 presents the idea that "there should be laws that limit the amount of goods a certain person can accumulate" and the second, poses scenarios such as "it is possible (although we cannot know for sure) that living conditions in thirty or forty years 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 topics of this year's university entrance exam history paper. In the first exercise, students had to explain the role of women during the Second Republic and Franco's dictatorship, based on two texts also written by women: a speech by Clara Campoamor and one by Pilar Primo de Rivera. In the first, Campoamor claims that women have also fought for the Republic and asks: "How can it be said that women have not fought and that they need an era, long years of the Republic, to prove their capability?".

In contrast, in the second speech, Pilar Primo de Rivera assures "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 governing the nation entails". And she adds: "The women's sections must have, with respect to the leaders, an attitude of absolute obedience and 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 drafting 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 Barcelona at the end of the 19th century and describing the social classes in the early years of the Restoration.

Regarding the "knowledge" exercises answered with multiple-choice questions. Students have to imagine they are journalists for a Spanish television channel and have to interview a family that emigrated from Andalusia to Barcelona in the 1960s and answer questions about shantytowns or the lack of housing due to the massive arrival of immigrants. On the other hand, they also have to put themselves in the shoes of a Congressman who lived through 23-F, precisely this year Tejero died and the documents of the coup d'état were 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" appears.

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

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 for Catalan literature, biology, design, business operation and business model design, and technology and engineering.