Repeating and Repeating
Earning a crust as an employee in Spain — especially if your Spanish isn’t top-notch — can be hard. What saved me was ending up in a town in Salamanca province where being a Brit was still a novelty. A local language academy was happy to employ me so it could advertise native-speaker classes, and from there it became relatively easy to find work whenever I moved.
Over the years I taught everyone from tiny, biting children through to university students trying to beef up their CVs, as well as employees in places as varied as shopping centres, power stations and chemical works. I also spent a year teaching across the full secondary age range in a state-funded but privately run secondary school. It wasn’t a lifetime at the chalk face, but it was long enough, and varied enough, to notice patterns.
Teaching English involves a lot of talking, much of it about learning — methods, experiences, goals and the like. I couldn’t help but notice the difference between what the students expected from this process and what I hoped they wanted. This difference was most obvious in classes that led to a qualification. I would ask whether they wanted to learn to speak English or simply to pass the exam. Passing the exam won hands down.
I have to be careful here because I know teachers who read this blog and people with children in school here. I do not want to lose friends or upset anyone, but it has always seemed to me that the Spanish system has some big holes. In fact, I suspect most education systems do. Certainly, the British system I went through in the 60s and 70s is now considered a complete disaster, but I did OK from that system, and most people going through the current Spanish system will do OK from it too.
When I checked the detail of what I’d heard on the radio, it turned out to be about funding disparities and working conditions — a faltering of the organisation of education rather than any discussion of teaching and learning. Yet whenever I have had this conversation about education, the recurring themes are not just resources, staffing and bureaucracy, but the very structure of the system.
Teachers usually start by complaining every time there is a new Government in Spain it introduces a new education law. That means the curriculum and evaluation methods change too. Teachers say they are constantly unsure about what is expected of them in mainstream education.
Then there is the high drop-out rate. Although the rate for early school leaving has dropped significantly in the last few years Spain still has one of the EU’s highest early-leaving rates. For many young people, the lure of earning a reasonable wage has long outweighed the abstract promise of qualifications. Jobs in construction, bars or agriculture have often provided decent pay for school leavers, so leaving early has been a way out for youngsters who find the education system boring, repetitive, beyond — or beneath — their perceived abilities.
One of the reasons young people find the system repetitive is that it genuinely is. The qualification at the end of secondary schooling is a single certificate so it's a bit all or nothing. The system is unlike, for instance, British GCSEs where partial success is perfectly possible. In Spain, when a student fails in a couple of subjects, they have to repeat the entire year, retaking all subjects, including the ones they passed, and covering exactly the same material. That system has changed recently but until now almost a third of 15-year-olds have had to do this at least once. It’s easy to see how discouraging that must be — labelled a failure and suddenly sitting among classmates you don’t know. Unsurprisingly, repeating a year is one of the strongest predictors of leaving school early.
Then there is the habit of learning by rote — ploughing through a textbook page by page, memorising rather than understanding. Many Spanish students can recite verb tables, or pre-prepared phrases, but struggle to build a natural sentence in a foreign language. Even multiplication tables are treated as an abstract exercise rather than as a tool to turn a recipe for four people into one for twelve. One English exam board even had to change the structure of its speaking exam because Spanish students prepared grammatically perfect five-minute speeches, which they then learned parrot-fashion. International assessments such as PISA, which measure how students apply knowledge, expose this weakness in a system that trains pupils to know things rather than to use them.
The belief that the person at the front of the class — or the textbook — holds all the answers still lingers in a system slow to recognise how fast the world now changes, or how the internet has made information more accessible than ever.
One difference that struck me, coming from the UK, was how students’ work is marked. You could sum it up as a shift from rewarding success — positive marking — to penalising failure.
Academic and vocational testing in Spain often focuses on catching mistakes rather than rewarding achievement. While most systems add points for correct answers and effort, the Spanish system uses formulas that subtract points for errors in, for instance, multiple-choice tests. This penalising logic is also evident in driving exams: practical assessments focus on subtracting points for specific rule violations rather than judging whether the learner drives well overall. The driving test theory exam also uses trick questions intended to trip up applicants.
What always amused and exasperated me in equal measure was how convinced my learners of English were that there was only one correct way to do things. They treated grammar as holy writ and were shocked by the idea that communication might matter more than reciting irregular verbs in perfect order. But that devotion to the rule book goes far beyond the classroom. You see it in local administration, where a missing stamp can halt a process for weeks, or in healthcare, where more attention is paid to the computer screen and whatever it demands than to the patient in front of it. These habits are not accidental: they are the predictable outcome of an education system that rewards compliance, repetition and error-avoidance over understanding, judgement and use. Spain has no shortage of talent or creativity; it is simply trained, from an early age, to follow procedure so carefully that questioning it can feel almost subversive.
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