What's Wrong with Catalan Schools? (I)

Stuyvesant High School, founded in lower Manhattan in 1904, has graduated four future Nobel laureates, as well as the Attorney General of the United States. The Bronx High School of Science (1938) boasts seven Nobel-winning alumni, and the Brooklyn Technical High School (1922) two. All three schools are public. None charges tuition. All are selective, basing admission on an entrance examination. All thirteen Nobel prizes were in science or economics. In the same period, seven Nobel prizes have been awarded to Spaniards, five of them to writers. In science, then, three New York City public high schools with a student population of under 11,000 have out-produced a country of over forty million by a factor of six.

There is limited specialisation in Catalan secondary schools, available to students aged 16-18. It is not selective. There are no entrance examinations. Admission to programmes emphasising music and drama entail can be based on auditions, but is otherwise based on across-the-board academic standards. It is not a student applies for admission to university, and thus to a specific major or concentration, that the link between academic merit and the right to walk through a specific set of doors every weekday morning appears.

In publicly funded education, then, students are grouped by area of residence (which often means socio-economic grouping) and in accordance with their parents' religious, linguistics, and ideological preferences. The gifted are not segregated for so much as half a day per week, though legislation requires that they receive special attention, and academic achievement is not rewarded by more challenging work and brighter, more dedicated schoolmates. Elitism is left to the private sector. It shouldn't be.