If we say that the Aragonese rural school is innovative and the whole educational community participates in it, it is difficult to find someone who does not agree. We signed it without points or commas to add, especially those of us who have walked for decades classrooms located at the end of winding roads and amidst beautiful landscapes in their silence.
Being a teacher in a village school, in a rural school is a gesture that, when it is voluntary, arouses strangeness and even suspicion. It is not the usual thing and in many occasions the protagonists have to struggle with the incomprehension of some and others, this attitude that extends to other orders of the teaching universe. It is very good news that the education administration is promoting the incorporation into the curriculum of content related to the rural world, that 2-year classrooms are extended to rural schools and that teacher stability policies are sustained. For example.
The rural school, as a concept, awakens a feeling of tenderness, but sterile if not accompanied by courageous decisions and a sense of permanence. We are well read already and know too many stories of dedicated teachers who face their professional experience as a laudable but isolated gesture. And in our smaller localities we no longer need Omar Estrada (El profe Omar) or Don Gregorio (La lengua de las mariposas). We do not need heroes, heroines who face difficulties alone, but decisive actions such as those described that contribute to generating common projects for the future. Thus, there will be a day when it is not necessary to write dedications like the one that appears in the credits of «Hoy no pasamos lista»: «To those rural teachers who without haggling sacrifices bring the light of culture to the most remote villages in Spain». Like Don Manuel (Fernando F. Gómez), the new master of Peñascales. Like you. Like so many.
