By: maría antonia casanova  (Page 2/8)

The large extent of Europe’s migratory history comes as a surprise to many, who rather see it as a stable place. Migratory flows will remain, however, due to the accessibility of the knowledge of where the better labor and political condition exist thanks to global communication and transportation technology. Any person of any country can detect in what place they are offered better, more vital conditions and implement the mechanisms for their transfer. For example, most of the arrived foreigners to Madrid in the last years come from Ecuador, not from some bordering country or near Spain.

The community of Madrid evidently faces coexistence challenges due to a population that comes from different countries with people of different capacities and talents, along with the habitual differences between all human beings. This society of “differents” forces us to learn to respect that difference and to look for its enriching aspects. The following data refers to Madrid: In the beginning of the 2004/2005 school year, 93,500 students of other countries have been educated as opposed to the 25,000 from 1999-2000. Schools in Madrid manage more than 55 different languages belonging to more than one hundred-twenty nationalities.

The following progression in Figure 1 shows a sample of this fast evolution, relative to the annual education of pupils coming from other countries to Madrid.

Figure 1. Evolution relative to annual education of pupils from other countries coming to Madrid.

General Directive of Educative Promotion. Council of Education. Madrid.

Nearly 15,000 students present special educative necessities derived from some type of handicap, and of those students, 1.5-2% pose high capacities. The set of this population forces our system to respond to the challenge that these children’s diversity creates so that they can all obtain the proposed objectives. All students can develop their capacities and turn them into competitive tools, but success depends upon the functionality of the system’s general structure and operation, as well as the support of all the teaching staff most of all. We should not forget the absolute necessity of the cooperation of the family, society, and, in particular, the mass media, if we want to offer a coherent educative guideline to the children and young people in their formative stage. Education is everyone’s task, and if some facet fails, it will be difficult to reach the demanding goals that society itself raises and demands on the schools.

Initial expositions

The scholastic center develops the educative facts for the nation. As it is daily shown, the present society is enormously varied, thus, what before was considered “normal” now has become “diverse.” Diversity is the norm, not an exceptional situation. This we know well in the community of Madrid, where cultural pluralism is an easily verifiable fact.

If a scholastic center must respond to the educative and social exigencies, it seems evident that it would have to have a margin of governmental autonomy, a curricular design and organization that allows it to adapt its performance in a suitable form to the necessities of the customized education. This way, institutional education will be able to take care of its diverse population while striving to reach the educative quality that society rigorously demands. A center and a classroom structured for homogenous groups (false by principle: we are not all equal, we are all different) will never respond to the characteristics of every student since it will be aimed to a “standard student” that does not exist, and will leave aside all those that do not adjust to this pretended average term. Because diversity if the norm, every realistic educative exposition should start there. This reasoning is especially valid and unreservedly necessary to assume when refering to the stages of obligatory education, which assumes that education guarantees character adjustments in each student, making it an adequate offer for the student’s development. People are different; consequently, the educative system must be sufficiently flexible as to comply with individual particularities, considering everyone at the time of designing the agreed model. The system should adapt to the student and not inverse: this would guarantee quality formation.