{"id":5536,"date":"2025-10-03T00:02:18","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T22:02:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/?p=5536"},"modified":"2025-10-03T00:02:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T22:02:19","slug":"raising-a-city-kid-in-barcelona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/raising-a-city-kid-in-barcelona\/","title":{"rendered":"Raising a city kid in Barcelona"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I remember the days of blurred schedules, of working late, sleeping in, slipping out of the house at strange hours for improvised lunch dates, lunch dates stretching into dinner dates becoming cocktail nights. Every now and then I\u2019d catch a fleeting sight, like a blur or a moth skimming the edge of my vision, of parents waiting to pick up their kids in front of schools. That sight felt like death: something alien, incomprehensible, the end of life itself. Two days ago, on a sultry mid September afternoon, I found myself standing among them. Not in a restaurant ordering a <em>digestiu \u2014 <\/em>after lunch liquor \u2014 but on a sidewalk, holding a pink backpack covered in white tigers, inside it a peach neatly sliced in a tupperware.<\/p>\n<p>Many changes were expected from childrearing, but I hadn\u2019t foreseen how much it would transform the city itself. Though I still live in Barcelona, it feels as if I\u2019ve moved to an entirely different, faraway place, with new rhythms and inhabitants, even new languages. Standing on the sidewalk, I felt like a savage from the woods meeting the members of a more civilised tribe. Who were these people? In my (possibly twisted) imagination, they were productive members of society with 9-to-5s, instinctively attuned to the rules of small talk during the wait. Where had they been hiding? Perhaps in the same cave as the kind old ladies who effortlessly strike up conversations with my child on the bus, or the Pakistani shopkeepers who, the moment they see her walk in, reach for their phones to proudly display photos of their own little ones.<\/p>\n<p>Just as I was beginning to meet my fellow citizens, entire areas of the city that had once been invisible lit up, as if targeted by the eye of Sauron. The first to appear were the parks. In my area they were scarce, small enclosures hemmed in busy traffic, guarded from outside dangers by a shabby half-meter fence. Basically cages for city kids. How had I not noticed them before? Their metal slides that reach boiling temperatures in summer, the heartbreaking solitary swings. Was childhood always like this? Why wasn\u2019t every parent up in arms, storming the city hall with torches?<\/p>\n<p>This rooky astonishment stems from the fact that I didn\u2019t grow up in the city. For much of my childhood, I believed Barcelona had no schools at all; at most it was a destination for field trips, museum days, maybe some last minute Christmas shopping. Schools, just like parks, belonged elsewhere. Schools to me were low buildings at the edge of a forest, with sprawling playgrounds, a separate gym and library, even an auditorium. The notion of a school crammed up between tall Eixample buildings, with just a sad rooftop for a playground, was simply ungraspable.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve now come to learn that the wide, open-air schools of my childhood do exist in Barcelona. They are at the foot of the Collserola range, beyond the Ronda de Dalt, one of the Olympic-era highways. Most are charter or private institutions, accessible by car or expensive school buses. Their websites promise a four-language education and fluency in coding by age four. Some are Montessori-adjacent, and presumably teach math by piling up sticks in the woods. The farther down the city you go, the more reality creeps in.<\/p>\n<p>Last February I embarked on the grim task of choosing a school for my child, which meant attending the \u201copen doors day\u201d of at least ten public centers. As I surfed wave after wave of pedagogical discourse, thick with euphemisms and impenetrable jargon, I drowned in anxiety, haunted by the thought that a wrong choice would derail my child\u2019s future. It then occurred to me that my parents never went through any of this. From age three to sixteen, I attended the same charter school (at the edge of a forest, etc) my mother had gone to. My Spanish literature teacher, Se\u00f1or P\u00e9rez, had been my mom\u2019s Spanish literature teacher. And anyway, back then the assumption was simple: whichever school you chose, it would provide a solid grounding in a range of subjects, which would prepare you kid for college and the challenges of the greater world.<\/p>\n<p>I craved that straightforwardness, a mindless faith in the institution. Instead, it felt like stepping into a vortex of dark omens. Everywhere I turned, there was evidence that something had gone terribly wrong in the education system. Both Spanish and international ratings placed Catalan schools at the bottom. Jaded teachers wrote books and appeared on TV, lamenting absurd reforms, describing classrooms where barely literate teenagers reviled their barely literate teachers, stripped of all authority; a general collapse of the learning process. A friend who is two years ahead in the game tried to reassure me by saying (and forgive the expletive): \u201cdon\u2019t worry too much, they turn up retarded no matter where you send them\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Just last week, that same friend was frantically searching for schools with open spots. The public one her two kids attend, she lamented, is now crammed with \u201cexpats\u201d. She fears that constant proximity to affluent foreign kids whose parents work remote laptop jobs \u2014and therefore have time to joyfully involve themselves in every school activity\u2014 will highlight for her own children the stark realities of their working-class home. In her search she\u2019s considering charter schools, \u201cbecause I prefer my rich people undisguised\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>As for myself, I chose a public school just a few blocks down. A renowned educator later told me that proximity is the most important factor: it allows children to build a community, to befriend the kids next door. That\u2019s one thing I never had, shuttled by car and then by train to a school in another town. To mark the start of this new era, we\u2019ve retired the stroller. Every morning we take our seven-minute walk, with a mandatory stop at the bakery, where the kind young woman slips my daughter a tiny bread bun and a wink. Sometimes the bun is even free: when her boss is not around, I presume.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I remember the days of blurred schedules, of working late, sleeping in, slipping out of the house at strange hours for improvised lunch dates, lunch dates stretching into dinner dates becoming cocktail nights. Every now and then I\u2019d catch a fleeting sight, like a blur or a moth skimming the edge of my vision, of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5643,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":244,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5536"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5798,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5536\/revisions\/5798"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}