Girls at the Pere Vila School with their laptops.
With this spring issue, Barcelona Metròpolis magazine has reached the first year of a new age. As the school year draws to a close, this time we focus our sights on education to weigh up one of the city’s most active and strategic sectors.
We cannot know for sure if we are living in the final winter of one era or the first spring of a whole new world. Whatever the case may be, we find ourselves in difficult, but also interesting times. Education is not immune to this profound change, which is opening up the fabulous but diz-zying possibilities of the digital revolution to the field of teaching. The new world has already begun.
Barcelona will soon have one of the largest fibre optic networks in the world, which will make it possible to optimise the internet connections of schools and other learning centres. Cloud computing is not merely a tool for virtua-lising software and scaling costs; rather, it will progressively change the way in which we relate to our environment. The explosion of ICT in classrooms is forcing us to reassess the role of teachers and, more than ever, recognise students’ attention as the most highly-valued asset, because the combination of hard work and active concentration will surely secure the bond between teacher and student.
In the field of higher education, Barcelona is a hub for academia. In addition to being one of the world’s top venues for congresses and conventions, every year the city receives thousands of students who come from around the world to study at our universities. Foreign universities are also opening up campuses to educate their students here. To give an example, the British performing arts school the Institute of the Arts Barcelona is soon to open its doors in Sitges, under the Barcelona brand, and aims to attract students from across the globe. As well as foreign schools we also have our own benchmarks, such as the Institut del Teatre which celebrated its centenary this year. And in addition to such age-old institutions, an emerging educational sector is consolidating Barcelona as an ideal city to learn and train in.
But let us consider education in the broader sense, not just in relation to schools. The cardiologist Valentí Fuster, interviewed in this issue, reminds us that health is inextric-ably linked to education and that we must move from treat-ing illnesses to educating ourselves in the ways of health. We are also exploring new, groundbreaking forms of education that have given Barcelona internationally known success stories. This is the case of La Masia, the school of FC Barcelona, which we look at through the story of one of its key figures, Oriol Tort, the scout who discovered players such as Carles Puyol, Cesc Fàbregas and Bojan Krki?. We also have a report on new music education projects includ-ing the Sant Andreu Jazz Band, a world-renowned youth orchestra that has dazzled the great figures of jazz on the international scene. Furthermore, we present Tiching, a platform designed in Barcelona that is enjoying consid-erable success abroad. It invites teachers, parents and students to share educational resources in a large virtual community and aims to be a benchmark social network for the field of education.
The Barcelona brand is also an educational brand, one which provides inspiration to the world of learning.
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