VIA Num. 13 / September'10

Editorial

Jordi Amat

"La pell de brau", by Salvador Espriu. A synthesis

Olívia Gassol

On 24 November 2009, President Jordi Pujol wrote an article for the CEJP Newsletter that caused quite a stir: «El fracàs de l’Espriu» (Espriu’s failure). While awaiting the ruling on the Statute, Pujol said that it was end of a hope: the hope of building a true political organisation of Spain as a multinational state. This was the failure of the utopia of La pell de brau. In this article, the lecturer Olívia Gassol, author of a memorable book on Espriu’s collection of poems, describes the network of feelings of this classical work and sets its composition within the intellectual political debates that took place at the end of the 1950’s and in the early 1960’s.

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Vicens and the Minotaur. With reference to "Notícia de Catalunya", by Jaume Vicens Vives

Enric Pujol

This year commemorates the centenary of the birth of Jaume Vicens Vives. A key figure of 20th century intellectual Catalanism, his emblematic Notícia de Catalunya –a synthesis of the past concealing a political strategy for the future– is a work that is still open to the kind of analysis and debate that Enric Pujol subjects it to in the present article. Professor Pujol, one of the leading experts in Catalan historiography, compares the two versions of this classic book, describing the constants that can be detected in the thoughts of a Vicens Vives undergoing constant mutation, and providing us with a critical interpretation that is framed within the critical review that Catalanism has been subjecting itself to over the last few years.

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Responding to Disasters Effectively

George Carner

Disasters seem to happen more frequently, with greater intensity, and to get instant media coverage, which inspires worldwide compassion and generosity in contributing money and supplies to help provide relief and rehabilitation. Disasters also mobilise governments, along with international, non-government and charitable organisations, and large aid packages. Even national military assets are increasingly deployed. The scale of assistance and the multiplicity of actors create many challenges in terms of coordination and the effective use of humanitarian aid. For this reason, the international community has established principles of good humanitarian action and has set up, within the United Nations Organisation, an elaborate system of humanitarian appeals and action. So why does all this aid still seem disorganised and why does it take so long slow to reach the victims? What efforts are being made to make disaster assistance more effective? This article addresses these questions while describing the system of humanitarian response and the challenges that it faces.

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The Euro’s State of Health

Josep Manel Comajuncosa

A few months ago, the concerns of some leading economists regarding the future of the euro made the leap from academic debate to the dailies. Professor Comajuncosa introduces us here to the deficiencies of the Stability Pact that led to the euro and which, whether positive or negative, was the result of a political agreement. Now, however, it is time to lay the foundations that will guarantee its future. In order to do so we have to coordinate fiscal policies and control the debt of the member states, as well as correcting the chronic imbalances of the different economies and implementing a long list of pending reforms. Spain is embarking on this path from a complex situation, part of which is due to its misuse of European cohesion funds, which for years were used to back the state up economically, rather than being invested in improving its competitiveness. Nevertheless, the author believes that the euro is viable and recommends the relaxing of fiscal adjustment to help it recover.

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An Appraisal of the Fourth Spanish Presidency of the EU

Romina Calvet

During the first six months of 2010, the rotating Presidency of the EU Council, one of the most important institutional responsibilities in the integration of Europe, fell to Spain, coinciding with the historic moment in which the new Lisbon Treaty came into force, which has substantially modified the framework within which the process of European integration is going to progress over the coming years. Furthermore, the Spanish Presidency took place in the midst of a complex situation, characterised by the economic and financial crisis, and had to react to unforeseen events and difficulties such as the delay in starting up the new European Commission or the adjournment of the summit with the US. This article offers an appraisal of the fourth Spanish EU Presidency, going over the specific aspects and challenges that it had to face, the major priorities at the start and the issues that ultimately proved to be most relevant.

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Educating and Building Fairer Societies

Juan Carlos Tedesco

Learning to live together and learning how to learn are the two pillars on which educational practices should focus, with a view to building fairer and more prosperous societies. According to the author of this article the key, and also the biggest obstacle to this becoming a reality rather than mere discourse, lies particularly in the cultural dynamic of the new capitalism that has shown, among other things, a very low level of organic solidarity and which requires that citizens behaviour be based more on information and voluntary adhesion than has been the case under industrial capitalism or in more traditional societies.

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International Trends in Educational Policy

Francesc Pedró

Measuring the quality of the educational system and of the policies applied to it establishes the quality of student learning and, ultimately, the skills acquired by the population as a whole, along with how evenly these skills are distributed. Based on this premise, the author of this article, an internationally renowned expert, claims that the factors that make a difference are directly related to the due treatment of three binomials that summarise the trends which, from now on, are going to determine how educational systems develop in the future: the assessment and autonomy of centres, the assessment and personalisation of learning, and the assessment and support for teaching. Each of these binomials has its own importance and strategy: student-personalisation; teaching-support; centre-autonomy.

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Changing the Education Model

Enric Roca

The realisation that, in the last few years, the Catalan educational system has produced very modest results has forced us to rethink the current didactic model, based primarily on the egalitarian transmission of knowledge to an average group of students. With the help of digitalisation, the changes that we propose affect how the curriculum is conceived, types of activities and student groupings, management of time and school spaces, different kinds of digitalisation in the classroom, how to make better use of talent and management based on leadership skills. All of these changes are brought together in a new pedagogical paradigm, a comprehensive multi-support model that is becoming the example of a possible alternative to the current inefficient model of education.

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Training Citizens for a Plural, Free, Self-Assured and Just Catalonia

Xavier Besalú

The Catalonia that will take in the children and youngsters of today, both from Catalonia itself and abroad, has little in common with the Catalonia of fifty years ago and past models of socialisation are therefore of little use. On the other hand, with schools having lost their cultural primacy in achieving the aims established by educational laws, it is vital to secure the complicity and involvement of all those with educational goals. There are sufficiently effective instruments to take on the challenges proposed by the growing cultural diversity of students but some issues have yet to be resolved.

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The Most Beautiful Girl in the Kingdom: the Excitement in the Education Field with the Arrival of a very Charming Prince

Norberto Bottani

This report sets out a critical view of the history of large-scale international assessments, which started back in the nineteen-fifties. The IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) was the pioneering body, while the first subject to be assessed was Mathematics. In 1958, the first draft on the comparative evaluation project of students’ achievement in different education systems was produced. The main aim of this type of research was to identify the elements that could explain the achievements of education systems, in order to answer the crucial question of whether some educational systems are better than others, and how these can be defined so that we can learn from the best. The experience brought together from the research developed by the IEA came to prove, for the first time, that educational outcomes can be empirically measured and that the conclusions reached can actually be useful. The major achievement of the IEA has been to launch a set of tools, in order to make feasible the comparison of data on students’ achievements in different education systems. As a result, an international scientific group specialising in this field was set up. Its monopoly on achievement assessment resulted in the intervention and development –especially in the US– of other assessment associations, which may reduce the scientific autonomy of the IEA in the mid-term. From the intervention of the OECD in 1993, international assessment policies adopted a new perspective. The features of the PISA project, which show a diachronic coherence and focus on three major domains while assessing competence levels –and not those of specific curricular knowledge–, turn their conclusions into a very powerful and influential weapon with regard to the educational policies of many countries.

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Diversity of Families in terms of their Children’s Education

Javier Elzo

The relationship between family structure and the educational system is an important and controversial issue that cannot be dealt with in a single article. However, our aim has been to ask one of the more widely renowned sociologists and experts in the area of young people’s values and attitudes for his thoughts on this matter. The author, on the basis of several recent studies, highlights the differing degrees of engagement and satisfaction with the educational process, both for young children and teenagers, as well as their families. Based on the widely accepted hypothesis that the postmodern family is characterised by its plasticity (we can no longer talk of a family as a unit of sociological analysis but rather as a multiplicity of family types), Elzo analyses the risks and advantages inherent in each of the four family types into which Catalan society can be divided, with a view to achieving a good symbiosis between the family environment and the educational system.

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Entrevista a Shlomo Ben Ami

Joan B. Culla

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Full magazine

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