As a blogger, I have a policy of not blogging about blogging itself. Since SpainStruck´s my blog, however, I´ve decided to suspend that policy for one post.
The Facebook group, Writers and Bloggers About Spain, a talented and bloody-minded bunch that brighten up my day, is essentially made up of entrepreneurs.
I´ve always been prejudiced against entrepreneurs. The reasons for this are complex and long-winded and go back to the 12th Century so I´m not going to expand on this now. The WABAS group have unwittingly and successfully challenged that prejudice of mine …. though I was already on such a learning curve myself, since living in Spain has forced me to re-examine the outmoded and ineffectual patterns of thought that used to dominate my intellectual inheritance.
I want to illustrate what I mean via an anecdote.
Picture it. A working-class barrio in Alcalá de Henares. A chat outside the butcher´s with an admired neighbour. He´s about my age, funny, smart and cheeky. He always takes the piss out of me and is as much of a natural rebel as myself. We get on.
Yet what he had to say shocked me. After the initial, and by now, obligatory exchange of improperios concerning the economic crisis, he mentioned that he´d been taking his daughter around to echar currículos (leave copies of her CV) in every kind of organization and business in the hope of finding her a job.
I admired his dedication to his daughter …. till I realised what he meant. He´s not driving her places and waiting in the car. She´s got her own car. No, my neighbour is leading his 25 year-old daughter into the above-mentioned places and haranguing employees and funcionarios (admin staff) into letting her leave her CV.
“She´s so shy,” he said. ”She´s really capable, she´s got great marks, but she can´t push herself forward.”
If I was an employer, would I give her a job?
No way.
In what world is it acceptable for a 25 year old girl to trail mutely behind her Daddy on a job search? It´s plainly ridiculous, yet this father chatted on as though this approach to his daughter´s future was perfectly normal. Couldn´t he see that any employer would wonder what initiative, what gumption, that girl could possibly have herself?
Apparently not.
I realised I´d found the famous niña de Rajoy. During his electoral campaign the inept politician and now President of the Spanish Government, Mariano Rajoy, employed the slushy reclamo of a little girl on which to project a future in which all young people would be successful in conservative Spain.
This ”feminization” of the bright, Spanish future was a “right on” electioneering trick in the fight to win votes, an attempt to soften the macho ibérico image of the Partido Popular. It didn´t work – but it did subtly associate the female with the sentimental, equating it with vulnerability.
My neighbour appears to have fallen into a vat of slushy, paternalistic protectionism and is rendering his daughter powerless.
The Facebook WASAB group often argue for an entrepreneurial education for children. Having listened to my neighbour and seen too, how initiative and originality are often marked down in the Spanish educational system, I see that the dependence of labour on the State is often counterproductive, especially when that State is veering further and further towards fascism and engineered unemployment.
So, one of the alternatives is clearly entrepreneurship. By this I mean start up something yourself, use the new technologies, be creative, sell your knowledge, build something, create a space of economic freedom where there was none.
It´s not perfect. It´s still part and parcel of a rabid capitalist system that´s gone nuts. But it´s one of the ways in which Spanish youth can become empowered.
I do see that given her circumstances and education my niña de Rajoy neighbour isn´t really to blame for her passivity but I wonder what will happen if she doesn´t get a job – which is more than likely.
Will she seek alternative approaches to employment and stand up on her own two feet as a grown woman?
I hope so.
About Mo
To be fair to Spain, a number of institutions in the UK also discourage Entrepreurialism (even if that is a word, I’m sure I have not spelled it correctly)…. I can recall being suspended from by Grammar School aged 11 for taking in a flask of sausages, buying a batch of yesterday’s roll from the Baker and flogging them to unsuspecting pupils as Hot Dogs at break time. Apparently the Tuck Shop didn’t like it. I argued that it was free trade and competition, they argued that I didn’t have the appropriate Health & Safety qualifications to serve hot food. And then they wonder why kids today can’t be arsed to get a job.
I admire your spirit – at that age! Yes, people love free trade when it´s just for them! Small question though – what is a “flask” of sausages?
Here here from us, I am appalled at the way we do not teach, encourage and reward entrepreneurial skills in society enough, and I see what it is doing, or not doing for our young people. I rejected the phrase “lost generation” in favour of just misguided. What ever happened to developing job creation through creative thinking. We have become a society fuelled by graded exam results which only reflects a small amount of society. There are super skills laying undetected amongst a much larger part of society today and we have the tools to develop them.
Thanks for your comment Lauren. Your site looks great. I agree that the obsession with grading (particularly here in Spain) is dragging the educational system under, and the kids with it. My 13 year old daughter´s not good at exams (whereas it just so happened that I was) and she´s slow to finish them. It doesn´t mean she´s stupid but that the stressful approach used doesn´t suit her learning style. Projects at her school are not accepted if written up on a laptop – everything has to be hand-written. They have classes on computing but these don´t feed into the rest of her studies. It´s very disheartening.