"One day I vomited at school and they forced me to eat it; I have never tasted jam again"

PalmaOne of the most unpleasant episodes of my entire schooling I still have very present. One day, in the dining room, I vomited. And instead of taking care of me, they forced me to eat it. I still remember it with a very vivid feeling of disgust. It was strawberry jam and they made us eat it by the spoonful. I have never tasted it again. It was a period in which the school really indoctrinated, so much so that they now tell us teachers that we do it.

I still have engraved the moment of writing a date on a piece of paper for the first time: 1975, the year Franco died. I was in first grade of EGB. I didn't know it, but that period would be marked by a strange feeling: growing up between a school that was ending and another that was beginning.

I grew up in Carmel, a working-class neighborhood in Barcelona. I am the youngest of seven siblings, and at home they decided I wouldn't go to the public school at that time. It had a very bad reputation because it was where indoctrination was strongest. That's why I started at Menéndez Pidal, a private school. I only did first and second grade there, but I have very vivid memories of it. I wore a uniform, boys and girls were separated, and there was a picture of Franco in the classroom. It was a very disciplinary school.

Then, my parents took me out of there and I went to a very different school: Paulo Freire. It didn't have a playground and we went to the park, but the change was enormous. The education was more open, more alive. There was sport – athletics, gymnastics – but above all a way of doing things that was more participatory, more connected with what was happening around. Even though all my schooling was in Spanish, here we had a Catalan subject. At Paulo Freire I began to feel that school could be an interesting place, not just a space of obligations.

Later I went to the Mistral Academy, already very close to my home. It was a neighborhood school, with many extracurricular activities: football, basketball, ping-pong. They attached great importance to handwriting, to the neatness of the notebooks, to making everything well presented. But, at the same time, there was a very open way of functioning. We held assemblies, debates, we wrote a lot. There was space to express ourselves. We also did theater – I still remember A Midsummer Night's Dream– and the relationship with the teachers was much closer. It was a school designed for the people of the neighborhood, to give opportunities and to create community.

The big change came when we moved to Mallorca. I came from this more open model –group work, text production, various activities— and suddenly I found myself in a convent school, for girls only. It was a big shock. I felt completely out of place.

Politics in the classroom

There is a scene I haven't forgotten. It was 1982, shortly after Felipe González's victory. In class, they made us work on the political system. They dictated to us: "Alianza Popular, led by Mr. Manuel Fraga" and "the PSOE, led by Felipe González". I stood my ground: if one was 'Mister', the other had to be too. It caused quite a stir. Nothing was questioned there. Besides, every day we sang the Cara al sol.

I didn't last long in that center. Then I went to CIDE, and there everything changed again. It was a large, open school, surrounded by countryside. We used to play among almond trees. The teachers were close, accessible. Over time I have understood that not all schools are the same. Some suffocate you and some open you up. And what stays with you most is not the content, but how you were treated.

'My school years' is a series from ARA Balears that reconstructs what education in Mallorca was like decade by decade through first-person testimonies.*Text prepared from the testimony of the interviewee