"I went to a school for the children of outsiders, where Catalan didn't exist"

PalmaI am from 1979, the son of peninsular immigrants, and I grew up in Inca, but not in the center: we lived in the areas where the foreigners who had arrived in the 60s to work in industry had settled. My parents were part of that. That origin, which didn't seem important when you were little, ended up determining which school you went to. I started nursery school in the early 80s, still with an educational structure heavily marked by Francoism, and I went to Sant Vicenç de Paül, in the Crist Rei neighborhood. It was a school practically made for the children of immigrants. We were all Spanish speakers and, in the classroom, Catalan didn't exist. In fact, we needed it, but they didn't teach it to us.

Everything was done in Spanish, even in a context where many teachers – nuns, sisters of charity – were more comfortable in Catalan than in Spanish. They spoke Catalan among themselves, but in class they made an effort to maintain Spanish, often with hybrid expressions that I still recall with some irony today: “Be careful, don't step on the rug”.

This contradiction made one thing clear: for students like us, learning Catalan was almost impossible. We spent hours and hours in a Spanish-speaking school and, moreover, we didn't mix with other children. In Inca, the segregation was clear. There were schools where the Majorcans went –Sant Francesc or Sant Tomàs– and then the public schools and Sant Vicenç, which was where we outsiders ended up. It wasn't a written rule, but it worked like that.

The first years of EGB were taught by nuns. Over time the 'ladies' arrived, but the change was more aesthetic than pedagogical. Teaching continued to be based on memory and the master class, with no room for innovation. In class we were 44 students, boys and girls, in one of the first mixed promotions. The nuns did not handle it very well: every time there was a conflict, they repeated that they had made a mistake by letting boys in.

Social segregation

However, coexistence among us was not the problem. Roles existed – boys played one thing and girls another – but the real separation came more from social origin than from gender. What was very present was discipline. There was still physical punishment. I remember especially severe nuns who did not hesitate to apply it. One day, one threw an eraser at a student who was making noise and it ended up hitting a classmate. These were scenes that were part of normality.

The subtle humiliation was also present. I am left-handed, and this was a reason for constant correction. Derogatory comments, hours of calligraphy to force me to write in a certain way. I didn't always understand what they meant, but I did understand how they made me feel. Despite everything, not all memories were bad. There were teachers who treated students well and small novelties that seemed important, like the introduction of English. But the system had clear limits. Even sex education was diluted or avoided altogether. And one thing that is funny is that we had music classes practically in silence. Imagine what we did there.

Catalan, meanwhile, only appeared in a residual way, as if it were just another subject and not the language of the place. We studied it for specific hours, almost as if it were a foreign language, while everything else continued in Spanish. This marked a clear distance from the social reality that surrounded us.

From the Catholic school to the secular high school

The great turning point came with the change in the educational system. In my generation, we were presented with a decision: continue at Pau Casesnoves and do ESO or go to IES Berenguer d’Anoia and follow the BUP and COU path. That choice was not neutral. It generated a new segregation: students with more difficulties tended to go to Pau, while those of us who aspired to university ended up at Berenguer. I arrived there in 1993, and the contrast was immediate. I came from a religious and segregated school and found myself in a secular institute, with a different mentality. The first gesture was symbolic: I did not choose religion. But the deepest change was the language. At Berenguer, everything was done in Catalan.

For me, what I knew of Catalan at that time didn't come from school, but from outside, especially from television —watching Bola de Drac on TV3. Like me, many children of immigrants needed months to adapt to an educational system that operated entirely in Catalan. It was, in a way, the first real contact with the language within a formal space.

*Text prepared from the testimony of the interviewee

Over time, I've understood that I grew up between two educational models. One closed, hierarchical, and Hispanized, and another that tried to open up, incorporate Catalan, and lay the foundations for a more modern school. The transition from one to the other was not just academic: it was also a different way of understanding the language, learning, and the place you occupied within the system.

'My School Years' is a series from ARA Balears that reconstructs what education was like in Mallorca, decade by decade, through first-person testimonies. In this installment, we delve into the 80s.*Text prepared from the interviewee's testimony