Transforming the Vision of Classic Literature

Early Childhood Education and Primary Education

I was born on June 20, 1975, just 5 months before Dictator Franco died. He had kept Spain in a dictatorship for 40 years. My family lived in an apartment of 64 m² in a nine-story building of a typical working-class neighborhood in one of the industrial cities in the metropolitan area of Barcelona. This area of Barcelona, often referred to as Greater Barcelona, is a territorial entity operating on the principle of metropolitan municipality, comprising Barcelona and 34 adjacent municipalities.

The baby boom in Spain occurred throughout the period of Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975) but intensified during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s; since the second half of 1970s, fertility began to decline (Valiente, 1996). My household was composed only of my father, my mother, my brother, who is 16 months older than me, and me. In addition, my parents belonged to large families of six children each. In my father’s family, all six children were men; none earned a high school diploma, much less entered higher education. My mother’s family comprised of three girls and three boys. All six finished high school, and two sisters and a brother were able to finish a university degree. Both, my father and my mother, have had several unskilled jobs throughout their lives.

If social reproduction theories were inevitable, I could never have carried out many of the things I achieved. It is known that these theories have too often shaped the expected relationship between student achievements and the educational level of their parents (Baudelot & Establet, 1971; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Madero Cabib & Madero Cabib, 2013). In my house, there was an encyclopedia and not more than five novels. Some of these novels were bought by my mother from a known Spanish company that sold books by mail. Among these books, there were two classic works of literature: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and The Hive by Camilo José Cela; both received Nobel Prizes in literature.

Although my parents did not enter higher education, factors that may have had a positive influence in my cognitive development could be that they took me to a center for early childhood education when I was 2 years old; in addition, I spent the summers with my aunt, who was an active teacher.

When my brother and I were very young, 4 or 5 years old, we spent several summers in Tenerife, Canary Islands, where my mother’s family is from. My parents stayed in Barcelona, and we went to my grandparents’ home and spent a lot of time with my aunts as well. My aunt Carmen was a teacher of both special education and primary education. She always believed deeply in the power of education for social transformation. Since the start of her teaching career through today (now retired), she has been active in the collective Freinet, which is part of the Folk School Cooperative Movement. Alongside her and her two daughters, my brother and I spent the funniest summers of childhood that I can remember, and we also learned many things. She applied an active pedagogy to us: We learned science from excursions to the beach and in the mountain; we learned mathematics from making cakes; we learned how to write acrostic poems based on the words that surrounded us; and we learned about reading with Mafalda’s vignettes that we later discussed together.

After about 2 years at a nursery, I started preschool at a public school when I was 3 years old, which opened the same year in what used to be an abandoned factory. My city lacked public schools large enough to enroll all children. I remember that my brother and I accompanied my mother to some demonstrations where families demanded the construction of more public schools. I can now appreciate the importance of the protests organized by working-class families, who supported construction of new schools for children in the city. Many textile factories that grew rapidly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries around Barcelona were closed and abandoned because of the crisis of the 1970s (Baix Llobregat County Archive, 1985). Some of the factories were rehabilitated as municipal facilities such as schools and cultural centers. In the factory where my school was created, the rehabilitation was minimal, and it was closed a few years later. My memory of the first day of school is of a giant classroom, gray and dark, with a high ceiling and small windows. I also remember a tiny playground in one of the backyards of the factory that had gray concrete walls, stained with green mold, was treeless, and had no furniture or children’s toys.

To my delight, I was at this school for only one academic year; for my next year of preschool, my parents enrolled me in a newly constructed school. I was at the new school until I graduated from what was known in Spain as Basic General Education, which corresponded with compulsory education only to the age of 14. This educational system was created in 1970 when the Franco regime enacted the LGE (Ley General de Educación [LGE; Education Act]). This law was one of the dictatorship’s attempts to promote a more modern image of Spain and legitimize its authoritarian political profile in Europe. The main goal of the reform was to democratize education. However, at the same time, the dictatorship regime struggled to survive and still used the old mechanisms of political oppression and repression (Groves & Milito Barone, 2014). The LGE did not consider Spanish educational experiences internationally recognized which were carried out during the first third of the 20th century, before the Civil War and the Dictatorship, such as Institución Libre de Enseñanza [Free Learning Institution], the Escuela Moderna [Modern School] of Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, or the rationalist schools that multiplied during the Second Republic (1931-1936; Flecha, López, & Saco, 1988). All those experiences shared the goals of a high-quality culture and for ensuring that education was accessible to all, as well as critical thinking, especially for the most disadvantaged social classes (Tiana, 2006). Among the educational activities that were developed in these schools, one could find a central focus on classic theater and literary gatherings for workers (Giner, 2011).

The school I attended, although in a new building, was one of those public schools that had low expectations and rates of school failure persisted from one generation to another. Theories of reproduction permeated teacher training, creating a group of teachers with very low expectations for working-class students (Iñiguez & Burgués, 2013). This influence was reflected in the curriculum standards, which did not include any references to the high culture. But not all teachers had allowed these restrictions to influence their educational practice. Some teachers believed in the abilities of all students, and they endeavored to help their students have a better education.

Despite the limited presence of the highest quality culture in the Spanish public education system, some experiences were promoted by teachers like Josep, who incorporated culture into the classroom. This was the case of an experience organized by theater students with the support of the City Council after the democratic transition. My hometown has always been governed by progressive political parties. That group of theater students performed portions of Homer’s The Odyssey in public schools. In my class, they performed the scene of the mermaids and Ulysses. We children were very excited because we never had anything like that happen in our school. Suddenly, in our room there was Ulysses, his crew, and the mermaids. The scenario was simple but the performers created a magical and enjoyable environment for young audiences. The sea, the ship, and its sails were made of white cloth, which shone with the clarity of sunlight coming through the large windows of the classroom. The children sat on the floor in a semicircle, like a Greek theater. We were amazed and in absolute silence, watching; within just a few minutes, our class was transformed into the Ulysses’ ship amid sea. We could hear the beating of the waves and the mermaids’ song, which were playing on a radio cassette. We entered into the scene like a dream.

After the performance, the actors opened a debate in which everyone could participate to share what we had enjoyed more or less. The theater group gave every child a booklet with different illustrated scenes from The Odyssey. In the following days, we read it during class time. I still have this booklet in which it is possible to see the words I underlined with a pencil to find meaning in the dictionary. This was the only experience of this kind in which I participated throughout my primary and secondary education. I do not remember any similar experience. It was probably one of the educational practices that had the most impact on my education, both for the things that we learned from the high culture and for the emotions that we shared in dialogue.

In the last academic year of primary school, my class consisted of only nine girls and 21 boys. Only a few moved on to secondary education, and of these, most dropped out before graduation. Only four went on to college: three girls and one boy.

Secondary Education

My secondary education took place in the only public high school that existed in my city at the time. This school was overcrowded, having seven classrooms for the first-year students. Each of the seven classrooms had about 40 students, so approximately 280 students began this academic year.

Exposure to worldwide classic works of literature during the high school years was minimal. Literature classes were stuck in traditional methods, in which the lecturer explained only the history of Spanish and Latin American literature, never other classic works of world literature. We just read some classic works of some Spanish writer, such as the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, to answer some questions about the work in the examination. This was an approach that did nothing to make reading literature exciting for teens. We read the book with the only motivation to answer exam questions that we would soon forget. So we would just internalize that the classics of literature were boring and far away from our everyday life.

It was in a history class, and not a literature class, where a teacher had us read two works that have become world classics: Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed and Sinuhe the Egyptian by Mika Waltari. This history teacher also was not influenced by the low expectations that some teachers had for their working-class students. Although his classes were traditional, the expectations were high. These history classes have undoubtedly contributed to the attraction I have today for world history.

When I attended high school, the County Council opened a public library near my house. They gave it the name of Montserrat Roig as a tribute to the recently deceased Catalan and feminist writer. In the early 1990s, the public library network spanned most towns and cities of Catalonia (Government of Catalonia, 1993). The library became a study place and common meeting space of my group of friends. For some of us, the library meant an improvement of our academic achievement because we had adequate space to concentrate and share study time with friends. Some of us began to borrow books from the library. Most of all, my friends and I were interested in the Magical Realism of Latin American literature. Some of my friends and I got to read almost all the works of Gabriel García Márquez. However, my interest in classic literature stopped there.

Higher Education and Community Education Practices at Adult School of La Verneda-Sant Martí

In college, I was a student in the bachelor in social education ¹ program at the University of Barcelona. I was excited because I had finally managed to enter the degree program of my first choice. In my first year, we read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). The reading of Freire fascinated me and strongly encouraged my belief that adult education was a means to freedom and social transformation.

At that time, I was eager to find a social movement that was involved in social transformation. In my second year, through some classmates, I started to get involved in an “alternative” circle related to the squatters’ movement in Barcelona. I was attracted by its supposed revolutionary image. I never participated in a squat house. I also never lived in a squatter house, but I began to relate with people living there. Most of the squatters were sons and daughters of people with liberal professions. There were also some young people from worker families, but we were a minority.

Without wanting to generalize, we observed that some of these sons and daughters were children of people with university degrees, although the students were believed to have had “emancipated” themselves. Even when “occupying” an empty house, they were still financially dependent on their parents, and “squatters” did “the shopping” or “laundry” in the homes of their parents. These kinds of “squatters” were used to find those who saw themselves as artists and intellectuals. Even kids who were barely 20 years old saw themselves as filmmakers because they had one of the first digital video cameras (as a gift of wealthy parents) and recorded boring videos that they called video art. Others saw themselves as writers. They extolled authors such as Nietzsche, but probably did not read any of his works in their entirety; they would read, at most, a fragment or the content that was in the philosophy book of the preparatory course for university access.

The image of the “revolutionary-intellectual-artist” had an aura of superiority that merged the relationships of some of these people with the “popular people,” whom these “revolutionaries” considered alienated. Contacts between these kinds of “squatters” and the popular classes were nonexistent. These “squatters” had no connection with the people who were doing truly transformative things in the poorest neighborhoods of Barcelona. From among all these “squatters” circles, only a couple of them were linked to popular movements, in which they remain involved. The goal of houses occupied by these squatters is supposedly to vindicate the right to housing for young people who are in the midst of the housing bubble that sky-rockets the prices of rents and flats. But they “squatted” by self-interest rather than collective interest. Nevertheless, they have been labeled as revolutionaries against the property system. These occupations were not related to any popular initiative to contribute to the improvement of people’s lives in the neighborhood where the occupied house was.

When some of these “revolutionaries” got tired of being “squatters” in old, unconditioned houses, their parents (architects, journalists, lawyers, and university professors) helped them buy apartments, complete with parquet floors and heating. Also, because these parents had important social relationships, they got good jobs for their children. Those who were working class were shattered and disillusioned to reengage in other movements, except for the few who were still linked to other movements that they followed.

At the same time when I got involved in the squatter movement, I began doing my practice hours as a community educator at Verneda-Sant Martí School for Adults. This school has the same name as the neighborhood where it is located, which is a working-class neighborhood in Barcelona where the first DLG was created in 1980. In the DLG, people without academic qualifications (some were literate in that school) read the classic works of literature such as Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Joyce, Sappho, and Woolf. Once a week, the adult students participate in a literary circle, where they discuss pages they previously agreed to read at home. People share the pieces they have selected and explain why; people often relate the selections to their own experiences. Then, the subsequent debate is generated from the egalitarian dialogue among participants, where all opinions are equally respected and heard (Serrano, Mirceva, & Larena, 2010).

Work at Federation of Cultural and Educational Associations for Adults (FACEPA)

After completing my services training period as a community educator, I started working at FACEPA (Valls-Carol, 2014). The two associations of members who manage the Adult School of the Verneda-Sant Martí are part of this federation. At the time I started, FACEPA began to promote the project “1001 Dialogic Literary Gatherings Worldwide.” In the framework of this project, one of my first responsibilities was to get involved in the organizing committee of the First Congress for that project. The DLG had begun to expand to different associations and schools for adult education. The participants decided to organize the first conference to unveil more of these experiences and build a worldwide movement. ²

In the process of organizing the conference, I participated in several DLGs. I was exposed to how participants shared their thoughts on the meaning the DLG had in their lives. The experiences of these gatherings, dialogues, and conversations with the participants were the keys to the development of my experience not only as an educator but also as a person. At the committee meetings, I listened to DLG participants talk about works they read, such as The Odyssey and The Iliad by Homer, Antigone and Oedipus by Sophocles, or poems about Sappho of Lesbos. The DLG participants explained how these readings and dialogues could relate to other people’s lives and to their own experiences. The topics that were generated in discussions about such works reflected upon issues such as the source of conflict, honor, anger, living in an increasingly diverse neighborhood, the struggle of women for their rights, and the fight for a dignified life, among many other issues key to our existence.

I remember when we read Les Misérables by Victor Hugo in one of the gatherings, some people searched for information about the Battle of Waterloo and Napoleon on the Internet. For some of these people, it was the first time they used a computer and accessed the Internet; in the gathering, people shared the information they had found with other participants. A discussion arose about how the battle increased misery and poverty among those most marginalized. When reading further in Les Misérables, participants connected historical facts referenced in the book with the information they sought on the Internet. The discussions went back to the origin of the French Revolution, and participants identified how it degraded. The book generated a profound debate on the death penalty, about which a consensus condemnation was reached and ended the debate. Some of the sessions on Les Misérables are among the strongest memories for me. We could see how this work of literature was a defense of the oppressed, independent of the location or historical moment in which they lived.

Another work that I had the opportunity to read in a DLG was Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. In this gathering, such topics emerged as the nonsense of the Russian bureaucratic state in the 19th century; the nobility’s decadence helped us understand more deeply how the Russian Revolution subsequently developed. I also remember the debates generated in the gathering about The Plague by Albert Camus, when participants reflected upon the solidarity, mutual support, and freedom of individuals in the face of an imposition. Some of the discussions at this gathering emphasized how these principles were at the basis of many of the ideas that their adult school had been promoting to improve the neighborhood and the lives of the residents.

The DLG connected me to the little moments in my life, and I had the opportunity to enjoy classic literature; the DLG revealed memories of childhood, erased until then, as my classroom converted into Ulysses’ ship. The DLG got me away from the memory of the gray school-factory aimed to reproduce the inequalities in working-class children. But the gatherings also revealed memories of the literacy activities with my aunt, the assemblies with my teacher, Josep, and the moments I shared with my high school friends, sitting on the bench in front of the library talking about the works of Magical Realism that we had read; and of course, the DLG pulled me away from that “alternative” circle in which I was previously involved.

The shared dialogues with the participants of the DLG taught me that we cannot allow classic literature, a world heritage, to belong only to the cultural elite. Classic literature is not synonymous with hard or boring; it is synonymous with social transformation and cultural creation. The DLG taught me that there is a revolution of people who did not have the access to education as children and who are now creating knowledge by discussing the issues that have arisen from these readings and their own lives. Because of all the conversations I had with people involved in the DLG, I realized that DLG was a truly revolutionary movement that was transforming society. One day, at a meeting of the DLG’s organizing committee of the Congress, one of the women participants said, “As Freire said, more education and reading for people means that we will be freer. We will be even freer if we read the higher quality books written through humanity’s history.” I witnessed how people involved in the DLG were not only free to make decisions about their own lives, overcoming many of the barriers imposed by the academic world, but they also ended up being the most involved people in their neighborhoods. They are a part of many initiatives, such as the struggle for a democratic and quality education. They are also involved in defending the rights of immigrants who have just arrived at the neighborhood. Another participant claims that some of the women participating in the DLG are involved in campaigns to break the silence about gender violence.

The First Congress of DLGs took place on April 1, 2000. It was a success, really exciting. More than 300 learners in adult education and educators shared their experiences on how the DLG was contributing to social transformation. After the Congress, I went out with some “friends” from the “alternative circle,” which I described earlier. Having lived through all I experienced in the previous months—organizing the DLG congress, and sharing dialogues and deep thoughts with participants and other people involved in this cultural and educational movement—only then could I see the absurdity of the “pseudo-artists-intellectuals” who pretended to be revolutionaries.

So, a few weeks after the Congress, I chose to abandon this “alternative” atmosphere. I became further involved as a volunteer at the Adult School of La Verneda-Sant Martí, while continuing to work in FACEPA. Shortly thereafter, I moved to live in that neighborhood and share an apartment with some friends who were also involved in this cultural and educational movement. Since then, La Verneda has been my neighborhood. Being involved in this educational movement has given me the foundation and motivation to do things I never imagined doing: enrolling for a second university degree, graduating in Social and Cultural Anthropology, performing a doctorate in education, working at the Center of Research in Theories and Practices that Overcome Inequalities (CREA) at the University of Barcelona, and being a postdoctoral fellow for 2 years at the University of Edinburgh, specializing in educational actions that contribute to overcoming poverty.

We, educators and social researchers, are sometimes the ones who build the barriers to access of nonacademic people to the highest quality culture, either because we have not been brought up in such a culture or because we have not read books of such quality. Ever since I began participating in the DLG, I have been hooked on the best literature. In fact, now when I choose my readings (outside readings related to my academic work), I rarely choose a book that is not part of this literature. Sometimes I read other genres, but I prefer nothing more than the feeling and reflections that give me as much as when I read Zola, Dostoyevsky, or Tolstoy. My participation in DLG, and the educational movement that promotes it, has strengthened my commitment to continue working for research which contributes to overcome social inequalities, just as my commitment has helped my relationships become deeper and more humane.