Spain from Within

by Rafael Shaw

“There is an absolute lack of any educational spirit, of any contact between teachers and pupils, of any feeling of solidarity among the students, of any organisation of games, excursions, &c., of any artistic refinement, and of any organised effort to raise the moral standard, to-day perhaps the most degraded in the world.”

When we turn to the administration of the elementary schools, the part of the educational system which more directly and immediately affects the working classes, we find the same general state of inefficiency and neglect.

A volume of school statistics was officially issued not long ago, of which a useful summary was published in the Heraldo de Madrid in November, 1909.

From this it appears that while four provinces have the full complement of Elementary schools required by the law, the supply in all the remaining 45 is deficient, the shortage per province being from 772 schools downwards, and the total deficiency amounting to 9,505 schools. The total increase of school supply between 1870 and 1908 is 2,150 schools, or an average of about 56 schools per year. At this rate it would take over 150 years to catch up even to the school provision required by the school law of 1857, without allowing for any increase of population.

But in another way, about two-thirds of the school districts of Spain, or some thirty thousand towns and villages, have no Government school. In Madrid about half the schools required by law are wanting. Barcelona has a somewhat similar deficiency. And be it remembered that the school supply is calculated in accordance with the law of 1857, the requirements of which are far below those which obtain in any other country in Europe, so that even in the very few districts where there is nominally sufficient school accommodation there is actually a serious deficiency according to modern standards of what is necessary. The consequence, as the Heraldo observes, is that some 12,000,000 of the population do not know their letters.

But the towns where there is a school are not really much better off, educationally, than those that have none. Save in very exceptional cases, no attempt is made to enforce school attendance, and though some of the parents send their children to school, the careless and indifferent do not. The Alcalde, whose business it is to see that the law is carried out, probably is—except in the larger towns—entirely uneducated himself, and is not going to stir up possible ill-feeling by enforcing a law which does not benefit him personally, and of which he does not see the necessity. The Civil Governor, who is over the Alcalde, and whose duty it is to see that the education laws are carried out, probably is equally indifferent, and in any case has not the time to supervise all the Alcaldes of the scores of towns and villages in his province. The schoolmaster naturally does not trouble himself; his salary does not depend on the number of his pupils, but on the population of the school district. And, lastly, any attempt to enforce the attendance required by law, were it made, must necessarily fail, simply for lack of school accommodation, for already most if not all of the elementary schools have many more children on the register than there is room for. Thus school attendance, although nominally compulsory, is in fact purely voluntary, with the usual results.

The supply of school material is the duty of the Central Government, as already stated. This duty the Government delegates, not to the local authority, but to the schoolmaster, who receives, in addition to his salary, an allowance to scale for providing books, &c. The natural result is that he looks on this allowance as an augmentation of salary, and reduces the supply of books to the barest minimum, or to zero. It is not to be expected that the schools should be liberally or even decently supplied with these necessaries when every penny that can be saved on them is so much clear profit to the teacher. The consequence—seeing that books cannot be altogether dispensed with—is that the children have to pay for them, and the intention of the law, that schooling should be free to the poor, is frustrated.

The working classes, who, as has been said, honestly desire that their children may receive some rudiments of education, do not as a rule like the Government schools, because, they say, nothing is taught in them. It is not at all uncommon for the teacher to absent himself altogether from school during school hours. He may or may not set the children some lesson—for instance, a passage to repeat over and over again—and he may or may not lock the door after him when he goes away, but very often the children are left entirely alone during the hours when the school is open and they are supposed to be receiving instruction. Parents say, and no doubt with truth, that the moral consequences of this lack of supervision are exceedingly bad, and that a great deal of harm is done to the majority by uncontrolled association with a few demoralised children. A working man in a small provincial town complained to me that a whole school had been corrupted by the evil influence of one boy older than the rest.

It will naturally be asked why such a state of things is tolerated. The answer is easy. It is the duty of the Alcalde to see that the schoolmaster does his work and does not absent himself without leave. But the Alcalde may be a friend or relative of the schoolmaster, or may have other reasons for not worrying him by pedantically insisting that he do his duty. Besides which, it is quite probable that the schoolmaster is not being paid. His salary may not have been sent to the Ayuntamiento, or if sent may not have reached him. According to the article in the Heraldo above referred to, the Ayuntamientos are now in debt to the school teachers for arrears of salary amounting to 7,000,000 pesetas—say £280,000. Therefore the negligent schoolmaster is not unlikely to have a conclusive answer to any remonstrance that the Alcalde might be inclined to make: “Pay me my wages and I’ll do my work.”

The parents dare not complain. The Alcalde or the teacher, or both of them, would make things unpleasant for the audacious parent who hinted that either of them was not doing all he should, and there is further the tradition of hopeless submission to misrule of all kinds, from long experience of the uselessness and danger of protesting, which in itself makes the working man reluctant to take any steps against those in authority.