Guest Post: Thoughts on the Spanish Education System

We periodically post the work of Anderson students and alumni. Jordan Clark graduated from Anderson University in 2011 with a BA in Political Science. In this post, Jordan reflects on his experience the past two years teaching English to secondary students in Madrid. He is currently looking for opportunities to contribute to sustainability and urban planning & development in Indianapolis.

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Thoughts on the Spanish Education System

Jordan Clark

In front of the Ministry of Education

Following my 2011 graduation from AU, I had the good fortune of spending a pair of school years working as an English assistant at the Instituto Arquitecto Ventura Rodriguez, a secondary school in Madrid. My auxiliary teaching role afforded me an up-close and protracted look at one slice of the Spanish education system -- widely regarded both within Spain and without as an institution in crisis. The last several years have been (to put it mildly) unkind to every area of Spanish life, and though education in Spain suffered significant problems before the economic collapse, many believe it faces an even bleaker future because of it.

Lately the conservative-led Spanish government and its Ministry of Education have been making headlines for reform efforts that would: increase teacher workload by adding additional teaching hours and packing more students into each classroom; impose further standardized testing on an already exam-heavy system (both to separate out the best candidates for higher education and prioritize resources for those schools that have lower dropout rates); and most significantly, reduce funding for the public school system by 15 percent, despite an upward trend in student enrollment. Spain caught the austerity bug thanks to the economic crisis, and it looks like leadership have decided that no sector is off-limits.

Of course, in any country, it's easy to pick out a certain sector (or more) that just does not have it together. But I think it's worth stressing some of what afflicts the Spanish education system because current reform efforts seem to have been borne out of ignorance of the system's defects.

So, these are a few of the things that stood out to me during my two years in Madrid:

First of all, Spanish young people are incredibly bright, engaging, and capable. They're highly social, witty, as web-literate as anyone in the world. But in the classroom, these characteristics are often stymied. During most of the school year, my students seemed to be constantly stressed out. This was more the case the higher the grade level, and the closer we got to the end of a term. The reason usually initially consisted of a single word: examenes. Exams are at the heart of just about everything academics-wise in the school. They dominate virtually every school week, and test scores are treated as the end result rather than a means to assess how a student has progressed.

The U.S. Role in the Senkaku/Diaoyu Dispute

As part of our effort to highlight the work of Anderson students and alumni, the author has agreed to share the following piece from an assignment on American foreign policy. In this piece from last fall, recent graduate Ryan Daugherty argues for the U.S. to take a moderate stance towards the island dispute between China and Japan.

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The U.S. Role in the Senkaku/Diaoyu Dispute

Ryan Daugherty

The United States is in a very similar role that the United Kingdom was in over a hundred years ago. In this time, the UK saw its power overall falling and the rising powers of the United States and Germany. The UK went two different routes in how it accommodated the rise of new powers while it was still the overall dominant power. With the United States, the UK embraced and worked with the United States to behave as a world power should and the US over time took over many of the same roles that the United Kingdom had previously played. With Germany it was a different story. The UK and allies such as France tried to block and stymie the rise of Germany and this eventually led to the two World Wars. In a sense this is the role the United States is in now. While the United States is now an overall declining power but is losing relative power because of the rise of many other nations, it must find a way to accommodate the rise of many new powers to the world stage and China is the most important of those rising powers.

Guest Post: Language of Instruction in Tanzania: A Call for Bilingual Education

One of the goals of this blog is to highlight the work of our students and alumni in political science. You can expect to see several posts doing so in the near future. Kicking this off is the following essay from Anderson University alumnus Joshua Mlay, in which he shares some of his research on education policy in Tanzania.

Joshua is a graduate student in the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include language and literacy in Tanzania, and the privileging of colonial languages and culture at the expense of indigenous languages and culture.

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Language of Instruction in Tanzania: A Call for Bilingual Education

Josh Mlay

From the late 60’s to mid-80’s Tanzania was renowned for her strong ideals built upon the Ujamaa policy that emphasized Pan Africanism, self-reliance, and national unity. The Arusha Declaration (the blue print of the Ujamaa policy) unequivocally warned that reliance on foreign aid would undermine Tanzania’s ability to make independent policy decisions. Unfortunately, subsequent governments chose to ignore this warning. Today, Tanzania is one of the world's largest foreign aid recipients. Furthermore, foreign aid is the government's largest source of finance. The implications of Tanzania’s reliance on foreign aid are evident in the detrimental policy positions she has adopted. The use of English as the sole language of Instruction in Secondary and Tertiary education is one such example.

During the Ujamaa period (1967-1985), there were attempts to make Kiswahili the language of instruction in all levels of education. However, since then, the Tanzanian government in “collaboration” with the West has implemented English as the sole language of instruction in Secondary and Tertiary education. The implementation of English as the language of instruction has staggering implications for the future of Tanzania’s social, political, and economic growth. The purpose of this post is to problematize the lack of multiple languages of instruction in secondary schools in Tanzania, which hinders learning and contradicts the purposes of secondary education as determined by the language policy implemented by the Ministry of Education. I argue that there is a crucial need to critically asses the use of English as the language of instruction in Tanzanian schools and a need to develop and implement a bilingual educational policy.

Over 95 percent of Tanzanian’s speak Kiswahili and it serves as the country’s national language. Fewer than five percent of Tanzanian’s speak English at home. Despite this, English is used the language of instruction in Secondary and Tertiary education regardless of its limited use in other social and economic sectors. The use of English as the language of instruction in Secondary and Tertiary education is perhaps the most significant and detrimental consequence of Tanzanian government’s collusion with the West.