The MasonThere are 3,933 schools in Catalonia, but only one can boast of having been inaugurated by the writer and philosopher Eugeni d’Ors. Not only that: it can also boast of being the only school that is still active of the four that the Commonwealth created as a model for the pedagogical regeneration it wanted to promote. This is the Til·lers, a small rural school that has been operating since 1919 and is located right where the town of La Masó begins (or ends), in Alt Camp. “We were happy and content there,” recalls Anton Banús, a 53-year-old man who seems to miss that childhood. “The town has changed a lot because agriculture is declining,” he laments. La Masó is completely surrounded by hazel trees, one of the fruit trees that has paid the most in the recent drought. There are so many in the village that one has even snuck into the school yard, with the permission of the three hundred-year-old linden trees that watch over it and give it its name.
The school has 23 students divided into just two classes. There is the classroom for adults, with children from five different grades, and the classroom for children, with four different levels. This means that this Wednesday, when Martina celebrated her sixth birthday in class, she did so with three-year-old classmates. “Working here has only advantages, but if I had to say a small problem, it would be having so many different levels,” says Carol Bujaldón, the children’s teacher. Before taking care of the little ones, Carol had been the principal of this school, and if we go even further back, we would see her as a student. “When I was little there was only one teacher and in third grade you had to go to another school,” she remembers. At that time, all the children were neighbors of the town, a characteristic that has completely changed. Currently, the Tillers have students who come from Tarragona or even Salou, which is 28 kilometers away.
The one to blame for the fact that one of the schools with the most history in Catalonia has a waiting list is the principal, Aurora Roca Gayete. He began directing the center in the 2018-19 academic year and just taking over completely transformed the school. Influenced by the ideas of the German teacher Rebeca Wild, Roca Gayete was looking for how to put into practice all the ideas she had in her head, and after running a school in Pratdip and working for nine years at Escola el Martinet in Ripollet, she found a way. Only arriving at La Masó put it into practice: “I gathered the parents and explained to them that we would do it in a different way, and I explained to them the reasons for the change and also that everything was endorsed by this and that,” recalls Roca Gayete.
He also told them that they would always have the doors open to come to class to observe. “We mainly focus on children, we respect their rhythms and give them a lot of autonomy”, he explains. In fact, autonomy is key to being able to manage a classroom with so many different ages. The director acknowledges that some people confuse these terms with the lack of limits: “And of course we set limits! If you don’t set limits, you’re not respecting them! You need to guide them and set limits, but respecting their rhythm,” she insists. Some families in the village embraced the new project, while others did not quite see it clearly and prefer more traditional schools.
New School
The birth of this school, more than a hundred years ago, also involved pedagogical changes. The Commonwealth of Catalonia wanted to modernize the country and, in the field of education, it was dazzled by the New School, the pedagogical movement of the late 19th century that promoted active learning in contrast to traditional schooling. The Commonwealth promoted four schools (one in each demarcation) which were to serve as a prototype for the creation of the rest of the Catalan centres.
The first of them, and the only one that still functions as a school, was that of the Til·lers. Its history is interrupted during the Franco dictatorship, contrary to the new pedagogical ideas. Even so, the center reopened at the beginning of the 70s, thanks to the Pedagogical Renewal Movements. Since then, the Escola les Til·lers, which is part of the ZER Francolí, has suffered ups and downs, but it has continued to educate the children of the village and the surrounding area.
