My friend Vira and me

After visiting Bonn for the DW Global Media Forum, I spent two days in Berlin with my friends. It had been almost exactly two years since I last saw them. It was a little bit like being back home.

I went back to the student housing unit I had lived in for a year and, suddenly, I stepped back into the conversations we used to have. I have missed them dearly. My friends stayed at the ECLA, and they are now moving into the fourth year of the BA program, in which they have to work on a project for a full year. Vira told me she is going to do her project on an artist who takes on the relationship between the capitalist market and art. We had good conversations about the creative process and the struggles we both have when facing it.

I was so very happy to see my friend David, as well. He is Mexican, so, as the other Latin American student at ECLA, the two of us became very close. Since I have been back in Argentina, he has been working very hard on his German, taking lessons at the Freie Universität, sometimes making presentations, and also writing essays in German.

My friends David and Dana

Dana also told me about her project and what she expects to do afterwards. She said she was definitely going on for an MA. As we talked, I realized this is the kind of conversation I missed: filled with reflections and the ins and outs of academic life. In the rush of the everyday working world with putting in your time in the office and everything else, this approach to conversation is quite rare indeed.

Right after travelling to Germany, I told my parents how I wanted to go back to university and study something else. I feel like I haven’t done it for some time, and I miss the challenge of it.

As I think back on all of this now, an idea occurs to me: Education – or, better, learning – is an attitude towards life. Accepting the challenge can take you far. The big question is how to make accepting this challenge possible for everyone. That means finding ways for many students to avoid frustration, perhaps by adopting a teaching model that does not rely on model students, but, rather, that is open to everyone alike.

Maria's mother grading papers

I was having breakfast with my parents on Sunday. My mom is an English teacher, and she was grading papers. She asked me to take a look at some writing by her students.

“Do you think I’m being too demanding? This is for CAE [Cambridge English: Advanced] level,” she asked.

I pondered several things and exchanged ideas with her. It was during this conversation that I recalled how exactly I came to write in English as I do today.

When I found myself attending classes in Berlin, in an international college, writing philosophical essays of around 2,000 words, I realized I didn’t have a solid base of knowledge on how to write an essay. I had to learn how to structure complex ideas and elaborate thoughts by myself, through writing and feedback from faculty members. There’s a way in which, in Argentina, high standards in learning do not come from a joint effort, a socially sanctioned approach to providing good quality education. Instead, the standards come from individual initiative. It is by and large a common thing to hear people say: “I was lucky: in seventh grade, I had a wonderful language teacher,” or, “I didn’t have a hard time in math in college because for the last two years of high school my teacher was very demanding.”

In Argentina, when I was finishing high school, the system was 6-3-3: six years of primary school, three years of pre-high school, and three years of proper high school. In this last bit you had to choose an orientation, so it could be the case that your classmates and you had to part ways, and you found yourself in an entirely new group of people.

When preparing lessons, teachers set the standards by themselves

I remember doing grammar exercises during class. Some would take part and others would be at a complete loss. So the teacher would ask, “Who was your language teacher in pre-high school?” This is when you found out that some teachers stressed writing style, while others focused on grammar exercises, and, finally, some others made literature the priority. If you were lucky, you got a good basis in grammar and learned how to write properly and express yourself. This phenomenon that took place within the same school gets multiplied when you meet others your same age in college, who come from the provinces. Then the knowledge gap is wider than when you compare teenagers educated in Buenos Aires.

There is no single system that unifies educational standards. Even though teachers follow curricula, they may not emphasize one specific thing or another, and the rest is up to you. I sometimes get the feeling that either these topics in curricula are too general, or they are not properly evaluated at the end of the term. In any case, more often than not, you are left alone in making efforts to reach further.