Eduard Vallory:
Some of my uncles went to Scouting. They were part of a Scout group that was illegal. They were 10 or 11. But, yeah. Families knew that, for instance, Scout groups were one of the places where you could learn Catalan language because it was forbidden outside. So, many of these things were part of a civil society resistance of the dictatorship, particularly important to make possible that 40 years later, Catalan language was not extinguished or the Catalan feeling of political community kept existing.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Eduard Vallory talking about the history of the Scouting movement in Catalonia. As a former Cub Scout, I used to think I had a pretty decent handle on what Scouting’s all about. It turns out I didn’t know the half of it, as you may have already guessed. Today, Eduard is the Director General of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, the Chair of the Center for UNESCO in Catalonia. UNESCO stands for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. They’re the ones who declare places to be World Heritage sites, but they do a whole lot more than that. And, all this is striking because Eduard did it really, really badly in school, although he did really well as a Scout. He recently wrote a book called Aprendre, which is learning in Catalan about his experience in school and about how he makes sense of it now. In our interview, Eduard started off talking about one of the key themes of the book, the different roles of formal and informal education in his life.

Eduard Vallory:
I’ve been thinking that education was mostly school for almost all my life, and this is because my school experience was very bad. I repeated several courses. It was normal for me to do September exams. I didn’t arrive to university until I was 22, and that means that I repeated three courses in high school, and one of the academic years, I didn’t study. So, the idea of education, to me, was linked to school. However, I’ve been involved in non-formal education institutions, mostly the Girl and Boy Scout movement. And later on, when I did my PhD dissertation was on global citizenship education. So, I realized that it was another approach of education, but it was not until 10 years ago when I realized that it was another approach of what education is that challenged my traditional view and many people’s traditional view of what school should be.

Alec Patton:
Awesome. You live in Barcelona now? Is that where you grew up?

Eduard Vallory:
Yeah, I’m born and raised in Barcelona.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. Did you like school? I mean, obviously, you had trouble with it, but did you enjoy it?

Eduard Vallory:
No, I hate it. I found it boring, and I found it threatening. It was a space of not nice interactions. And, the most interesting thing is that I don’t think that this is mostly because teachers because there are some of these teachers that I’m still close to. It was because the assumptions that we all had, adults and children, on what school was were totally in the other extreme of my interests and my needs.

Alec Patton:
Do you remember a time when you liked school? Was there a time when the very young Eduard liked going to school?

Eduard Vallory:
Yeah. Until I was eight or nine, more or less, I like it. I’m one of these totally average kids that love learning, that reads, ask thousands of questions, explore, experiment, and when school was a space for me to do this, it worked. When it started to be focused on getting particular grades and passing particular tests, it didn’t match anymore on my needs and my interests.

Alec Patton:
Now, is there a moment that you remember of going, “Oh, something’s going wrong here.”

Eduard Vallory:
Yeah, it was when I was 10, 11 that I started to fail exams. It was the first time that I realized that, “Oh, there is something that I’m expected to do that I’m not able to, and I don’t know exactly why.” And, the interesting thing since then, I kept having the same problems. And, the most interesting thing is that I never understood, I never had any feedback of the why. The question was always, “Well, this is probably because you don’t put enough effort, you don’t put enough interest.” But, it never told me, “There is a problem of your understanding of the algorithm or of your conception of what a syntactic structure is.” So, today, I understand that I’ve never had a learning feedback, but it was clearly one of the things that I missed the most.

Alec Patton:
And, you said you still know some of your teachers. Have you ever asked them about that?

Eduard Vallory:
Yeah. One of the results of this moment of change around 8, 10 years ago, I was a director of a Graduate School of Economics in Barcelona. And, after being six years directing this institution, I say it was an alliance of two universities, I decided to leave it and to take a sabbatical year, and I went to NYU. And, in that time, I started to connect with educational institutions, the work of the Comparative and International Education Society at several points that show me a different logic on how learning and how education should be. After that, when I went back to Barcelona, I started to connect with several schools and I launch an initiative for education change.
And, I say all of this because it was through these initiatives that mobilized around 500 schools that one of the schools that entered into this was my old school. So, I enter in touch and I was invited to the school by the school to go and give a talk there. And, I had this conversation and what I realized is that many of the teachers were as puzzled as I was. I mean, they wanted kids to learn, but their understanding of learning had no alternatives of the traditional explaining and digest way. So, I realized that, sometimes, what happens is that there are no tools to go out of this cage, that is a cage both for students and for teachers.

Alec Patton:
So, I have an 8 to 10-year-old Eduard starts failing exams, doesn’t understand why. No one can really help. Then, 22-year-old Eduard starts college late because he had to repeat years and failed. And, then I have 8 to 10 years ago from now, Eduard is running a graduate school of Economics. So, fill in the details there. How does that?

Eduard Vallory:
Well, the first time that I started to make sense of all of this was very recently last year because a publisher asked me to write a book based on my school failure. And, taking this point, I started to reflect on what happened in the middle. So, the question is what and how learn, a person that didn’t learn in school. And, what I realized is that I was lucky enough to have both a great experience in non-formal education through civil society involvement, associations, young movements, particularly Scouting on the one hand that make me develop skills and values that had been incredibly valuable in my life, but also creating network, interacting with other people, understanding my potentials, and being able to cap on something that, to me now, I realize that was particularly relevant, which is self-esteem. So what I realize now is that the worst thing that happened to me in that time when I was a teenager, a late teenager was that my self-esteem was destroyed.

Alec Patton:
So, it seems like the Scouts were really important. Is that when you talk about civil society and youth movements, is the Scouts where that starts for you?

Eduard Vallory:
Yeah, exactly. Yes. Scouting in Catalonia is particularly important because it grew in a position of the dictatorship. So, it’s slightly different than I would say the average Scouting in the states. It grows in the anti-dictatorship. So, it’s quite reluctant to power, to verticality, to military, but it has the same grounds of empowering young people through giving them responsibilities and making them grow them. And, yeah, it was important because I was there since I was eight, and it gave me responsibilities when I was growing up.

Alec Patton:
Okay. I don’t know if you can do a little history of Scouting, but that is fascinating. So, how does it come about that people say, “Well, let’s start anti, an oppositional youth movement.” How does that happen?

Eduard Vallory:
Actually, it started a little bit before. So, Catalonia had built again its self-government structure in the thirties of the 20th century because the Spanish Republic. So, before, it had a situation of limits of the use of the Catalan language and institutions were kind of blocked. But, during the first third of the 20th century, in Catalonia, many things related with education and society flourish. Yesterday, I was speaking on Francisco y Guardia, the builder of the modern school, a person that was so relevant and also who was killed by his ideas, accused of anarchism. But, in that same time, another person came to the States, started with John Dewey, went back to Barcelona, started to spread Dewey’s ideas. So, many of these things on transforming education as a means to transform how society is developed.
And, it was in this context in the twenties that people that had this approach started to say, “We want to take this methodology called Scouting and to adapting this to empower young people in our society.” So, in the twenties and in thirties, this growth and then the dictatorship, the Civil War and the dictatorship that coup d’état arrived. And, in ’39 it started the dictatorship. But, these movements already were acting, and although they were illegalized, they were one of the most important sources of resistance and of building new leaderships for the anti-dictatorship.

Alec Patton:
So, were the Scouts illegal?

Eduard Vallory:
The Catalan Scouts were illegal, yeah. The illegalization of Scouting happened in Nazi Germany, in fascist Italy, in fascist Spain, in Japan, in Russia, after the revolution of the ’17. So, totalitarian regimes had forbidden Scouting. But, in Catalonia, the… So, Spanish Scouting was not illegalized, whereas Catalonian Scouting was illegalized, meaning that if you belong to this, you could go to jail.

Alec Patton:
But, it kept going?

Eduard Vallory:
It kept going. It kept going, hidden in many different activities like in church actions, in hiking clubs actions. So, they were hidden. And, some of the things that are explained in the forties is people who went without the scarves or stuff. And then, when they arrived in the countryside, they put it as a sign also of identity, right?

Alec Patton:
Right. How old do you start Scouting? How…

Eduard Vallory:
When you start, you could start when you are six.

Alec Patton:
So, in the 1940s, or I mean, for a while, you’d have a family who’d have a six year old and they’d go, “Okay, we’re going to go do this thing. You can’t tell anyone about it. If you see a cop, hide it.” And…

Eduard Vallory:
Yeah, and I know that precisely because some of my uncles went to Scouting and went in that way. They were part of a Scout group that was illegal. Maybe they were not six, but they were 10 or 11. But, yeah. Families knew that, for instance, Scout groups were one of the places where you could learn Catalan language because it was forbidden outside. So, many of these things were part of a civil society resistance of the dictatorship, particularly important to make possible that 40 years later, Catalan language was not extinguished, or the Catalan feeling of political community kept existing.

Alec Patton:
Yeah. And, was this just a boys thing or?

Eduard Vallory:
No, boys and girls. Yeah.

Alec Patton:
Boys and girls. Right. So, it’s together?

Eduard Vallory:
In Catalonia, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s coeducational.

Alec Patton:
Right. And, that’s still true today?

Eduard Vallory:
Oh, yeah.

Alec Patton:
So, how does this start for you? When do you start, when did you get involved?

Eduard Vallory:
I started when I was eight. My mom told me, “Oh, there are these things, the Scouts, why don’t you go?” And, I hated it. I went there. I remember the first day that I went there, I don’t know, I wanted to do something. Someone, maybe the Scout leader, told me something that I felt that it was mean. And, I went back, and I told my mom, “Look, I don’t want to go there anymore. This is something that I don’t like, these people.” And, she said, “Look. Okay, let’s make a commitment. You go a couple of times more, and then we decide.” And, I’ve been since then, collaborating. In my country, Scout leaders are young people, meaning people between 18 and 24, more or less. So, I was involved both as a Scout leader and, later on, leader of the association. So, until my mid-thirties, I was hugely involved. And, until now, at world level, at the World Organization the Scout movement and the World Associations on Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, I’ve been collaborating on with talks and strategic things, documents, et cetera.

Alec Patton:
So, what changed after that first day? Why’d you stick with it?

Eduard Vallory:
I think that the most interesting thing, for me, for Scouting was the combination of having a community, a people that you share values with. And, these values are also linked to making you feel belonging and having a space of love and acceptance. And, at the same time, having a context where you could explore and try things. And, in many different ways, intellectually speaking, practically speaking, learning from others, creating permanent challenges.

Alec Patton:
So, you had these sort of two parallel experiences. You talked about at school that you’re failing, you don’t understand why, no one else seems to understand why, no one has any ideas there. And then, meanwhile, were things going better in Scouting?

Eduard Vallory:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As I said, I realize now how the two worlds starting to separate in a way that were parallel and distant. The more years passed by, the more distance they were. And, this is because one area was focused on goals that I was unable to achieve for the reasons that they were and on permanent judgment. You are unable to. And, the other world was based on challenges, on love and affection, on sense of community, and on permanent learning. It’s like a contradiction that I realize now, but learning should have been the main element in my school experience, and it never was.

Alec Patton:
So, this is a slightly odd question. You talk about exams were this key moment in school. They’re kind of the moment, and you were failing at them. What was the equivalent of exams in Scouting?

Eduard Vallory:
Projects.

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Eduard Vallory:
So, we decide that this year for Christmas, we are going to do a video on the 10th anniversary of our Scout group for parents and for families and for the other members of the Scout group. So, we are a group of six Scouts, and we are maybe 15. What should we do? Well, we have to do a video. We don’t know how to do it. But, one of our Scout leaders was a journalist, and he had a camera, and he told us, “Look, we have to do these particular sketches, and let’s take sketches that we know from other places, from films and stuff and adapt it to something related with the history of our Scout group.” Now, that Scout leader that I had when I was a kid is one of the three producers of one of the most successful, let’s say, politics mocking or politics humor programs. That’s exactly the same that we did that in that Christmas, right?

Alec Patton:
He owes it all to you.

Eduard Vallory:
Exactly. Well, no, the other way around. So, we were learning to do what we are seeing now, and it was a big success when we show it. And, for us, that project was something that our life was on that. This logic of projects. Projects means something that makes sense to do that is worth putting effort on it, no? And, I think that this had been… All my life and, particularly, all my professional focus had been led by this idea of something that is worth devoting your time to.

Alec Patton:
Looking at that video, you had to write, you had to edit, you had to perform, you had to research, you had to learn history, you had to take things that you saw and create satirical, translate them into something. Did you ever think, “Wow, it’s weird that I could do that, and school’s not really working for me?”

Eduard Vallory:
No, not in my life. Because also, I did my PhD dissertation was called Global Citizenship Education and was focused on the case of Scouting as a global movement. But, even then, I was totally separating the learning of school and the learning of non-formal education as two different worlds. That is why when I started to realize that it was another way to understand education as a whole, which was link of what happened in my own country 100 years ago. No, it was not something that came from the sky. I realized that I was missing the main point, and this is why I am so passionate now that I found the point on this.

Alec Patton:
So, I’m guessing you became a Scout leader. So, you were a Scout leader around the time that you were going to college. And, so…

Eduard Vallory:
And, even a little bit before because I started to be a Scout leader when I was 18, and I entered college at 22.

Alec Patton:
How were you doing in college when you started?

Eduard Vallory:
I did it very well. I started college studying philosophy. You know that we don’t have mostly major or minors, but our undergraduate degrees are quite focused. So, I started four years philosophy undergraduate program. And, when I was more or less in the third year, I got a little bit bored on what we were doing because important part of we were doing was very focused on traditional lessons, someone explaining, you’re taking notes, et cetera. I moved to the school of journalism. I did the degree in journalism, and when I finished that, I went back, and I finished the degree on philosophy. But, to me, I didn’t need quite effort. So, it was easy. I find it easy.

Alec Patton:
So, how did you make sense of that?

Eduard Vallory:
I didn’t. I didn’t. Because one interesting thing, and that’s also something that I wanted to reflect on in the book that I was telling you about linked to this idea of failure, is that for many years I assume, and I believed that my failure in school was like being sick for a while. You have this weird time in your life when you are sick, something happens, and suddenly, you are not sick anymore, and that’s it. And, everything is all right.
So, my explanation in life is you had these weird years, but these things happen when you are a teenager, and then you are back into the normal. It took me a long while to understand that I wasn’t sick and that it was more of a social sickness that many kids are being victims of, and that this idea that this is the fault of these kids is taking many of these kids out of school, out of the system. So, it took me that while to understand that it was not that I had seven, eight years of my life that I was kind of distracted or not focused. It was a problem on how learning happened.

Alec Patton:
So, you start your philosophy degree, you take a break, and you get your journalism degree. You get your philosophy degree. How do you end up in economics?

Eduard Vallory:
That’s a nice question. Remember that in parallel of the university, I was like leader in, a board member in the Scouts and then chairman of this youth platform. And, this gave me a lot of public exposure. And, I was interacting with the government, with the parliament, with the Congress, promoting actions for young people, et cetera. And, it was in that context that this guy that is called Andreu Mas-Colell, who is an economist that just came few years before from Harvard, he’s the author of one of the most well known macroeconomics textbooks for grad studies, took the position of Minister for Universities and Research. And, he knew me because he attended something that I was giving a talk on with the Catalan president at that time, totally by chance. He told me, “Why don’t you come here and help me build this grad, this ministry, this new ministry?”
And, I did it. I was 28 at that moment, and it was a great experience because he’s so smart, generous, and at the same time, challenging. He’s very ambitious, not personally speaking, but on the projects, on the goals. And, that helped me build, with this combination of generosity and ambition, my professional profile and my contributions. Later on, I went after this, we were together three years and a half, I decided to go to the University of Chicago to do a Master’s in Research in Social Studies, mostly because I felt that I needed to have a deeper exposure on academic work. And, it was fantastic.
Later on, I had a position of a research fellow at the University of Cambridge where I was working on my dissertation, and I came back to Barcelona. And, in that time, he was trying to build this institution, the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. And, he asked me, “Why don’t you come and become the director?” And, I said, “Well, I have no idea on economics.” And, he said, “Well, we do have idea of economics, but you have idea on strategy, institutional development, public exposure.” And, yeah. I became the director of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, now called Barcelona School of Economics for the first six years. And, it was an incredibly learning experience.

Alec Patton:
And so, now we’re back full circle because this is the point when you suddenly think about education again.

Eduard Vallory:
Yeah. When I was director of the Barcelona Grad School of Economics, my feeling was, clearly, I am here because now, I’m in my normal behavior. Because what happened to me when I was a teenager was that I was in an abnormal moment, right? But, then I realized that many of the people that were there were people that were working, like James Heckman at the University of Chicago DoSS, on challenging the way we assess in public education or on measuring non-cognitive skills, or people of experimental economics trying to understand how market works based on performance of the students. And, I realized that it was another approach, and I started to go deep on this up to the point that after these six years, I decided to do a sabbatical and to try to figure out what was going on in all of that. And, it was in New York with all these elements and others that I started to realize that I needed to revise, to rethink, to reformulate my comprehension of what education was.

Alec Patton:
So, how did you do that?

Eduard Vallory:
Again, in a project based, self-organized because I started to visit schools and just visiting and trying to understand what happened. For instance, I remember visiting a school in Brooklyn in an unprivileged area, and the principal told me that it was so focused on students’ success, and they said, “We want them, their families haven’t gone to college, and we want them to go to college. So, we are here focused on that, on their success.” But, I went there, and I saw kids that were treated like in a military community. I said, “I don’t see empowerment here. I see kids that should adapt themselves on the school, not the other way around.”
And, I asked some questions, and then I moved to another school, and I realized that when the principal was walking, was speaking with kids, kids were seated in the, I don’t know, in the playground, and they were not even standing up when speaking with him. It was not fear on them, but they had a connection of, like some emotional one. So, in each one of these, how do you assess this? How big kids interact among them or with adults? What is the way adults speak about kids? How are the decorations? Each one of these questions led to another one, and the most you visit, the most new answers you create. That was the beginning of everything.

Alec Patton:
And so, what happens next?

Eduard Vallory:
A combination of things. I was invited to a conference on non-formal education in Hong Kong, the world conference, and I was asked to explain my approach on non-formal education, but they also asked me to organize a workshop with a guy who was working on transforming formal education, meaning schooling. And, then I started to learn that they were not two different approaches, but the same one. Then, I wrote a book on my dissertation called World Scouting, Educating for Global Citizenship. And, I was invited to present the book in the Comparative and International Education Society conference. And, I realized there that the keynote speech by the chairman of the society was on what we have to do to change the education systems all over the world towards student centered one, active learning one. And, I started to realize that many of the things that I saw in some schools were the same that in non-formal education people were speaking and the same that UNESCO was saying, the same of the society was saying. And, I thought that I had to go back to Barcelona and focus on this, and that’s what I did.

Alec Patton:
So, this brings us back to that organization that your old school ended up joining. Tell me more about that.

Eduard Vallory:
Well, I kept visiting schools, some of the schools that are here in deeper learning, L’Horitzo, Les Vinyes, many other schools. I started to see that there were many schools that were struggling on creating learning experiences for kids that were both challenging and meaningful and respectful of kids. And, this combination was amazing to me because it was what I was lacking, right? And, what I realized is that many schools also wanted to go in that direction but didn’t know how to do it. How we organize, how we change the school?
And, there were two different things. One, the change of mindset of teachers, of principals. Second, the change management, how you move them. So, I started to speak with these schools that were already working that way to ask them if we could create some kind of alliance for these schools that were already working in that direction to help the others through examples and through learning or training procedures. And, we created this initiative. It was during three years and a half that was called Escola Nova Vint-i-un. It means New School 21, and new school, it was because the beginning of 20th century movement, new school. So, taking something that explained that what we were doing went back to these people that 100 years ago was promoting.

Alec Patton:
And, is that still going now?

Eduard Vallory:
No, this ended up in late 2019. The idea was to change the mindset, and we were successful in this. Around 16% of our education system was involved on that, was around 500 schools. We create even a sample of 30 schools with which we did an intensive process of change with training, a clinical residency, training programs, actions of transforming the schools. And, we show that that was possible. And, we make all these procedures to be public and to be used both for public administrations and privates. And, this is something that is being now ongoing at several levels.

Alec Patton:
Cool. So, where’d the book come from?

Eduard Vallory:
The book comes from a provocation. I didn’t want to write a book on education because I thought and I believe that there are many people that I know that could explain much more on education than me because they are properly working at school level. But, then the provocation came from this publisher who told me, “Look. One day, in the talk that you gave, you mentioned something about your school failure, and you didn’t mention much more.” And, I said, “Yep, this is something that I sometimes came to my mind, but I don’t talk about it for two reasons. Why? One, because I don’t like to talk about me, and second, I don’t like to talk about my feelings, but it’s a cultural question.” And, she said, “Yeah, but my daughter is failing in school. So, explaining what is harmful for you, what it was painful for you, but also how you overcome it could be helpful for others.”
And, that was the beginning because when I started to write it, that was, I started on summer last year, I realized that the pain or the struggles were not only in school. So, I wanted also to try to reflect on the things that you ask, how the exposure in civil society was important, what happened with work, what happened with the work ethic? Is this more important? What happened with the idea of success? What is success for you? What do you realize when a person that you love dies or when you love someone and the other doesn’t love you? What happened with our interaction? What happened with our struggles of being alive and being humans, meaning needing the others to live? And, that was everything started with this point of school failure, but it built on a much bigger reflection on the grounds of what is relevant in life. That should be the grounds of what should be relevant in education.

Alec Patton:
So, when did that book come out?

Eduard Vallory:
Just this January.

Alec Patton:
And so, what are you doing now?

Eduard Vallory:
Well, I’m starting to do some talks. The book had been, the book title is Aprendre, it means to learn or learning. And, it came out in Catalan. And, I’m starting to do talks about the book in several cities. And, I’m also struggling with how to talk about this book because the book, basically, makes the reflection based on real life experiences. So, it’s not a biographical book. It’s a book that, from these life experiences, reflects on what is to live and what is relevant for education. And, I still find it difficult to talk about it. And, that’s the main point of a book. Now, the interesting thing, though, is that since the book was published, I think that it came out in mid-February. I was confused on that. I started to receive letters from people, messages on their own reflection. So, people use the book as a mirror, and this mirror I see is useful because it entitles them to talk about their pains, their doubts, their dreams, or the dreams that didn’t come true and the meaning.

Alec Patton:
Cool. And, are you continuing to work with schools?

Eduard Vallory:
I’m now working in Catalan University, Pompeu Fabra University, helping them to change the educational approach, but also in one of the schools of this network that is called L’Horitzo, doing a Socratic seminar. So, I’m experiencing for the first time what it is to work with kids that are 14 and 15, trying to build on them those skills that, for me, were so important. But, at the same time, we keep with these schools, the three that are here in deeper learning and around 30 more, a network of schools to learn from each other and to focus on the future of education.

Alec Patton:
It’s funny that you say that working with teenagers is new to you because you’ve been doing it in Scouting forever.

Eduard Vallory:
Exactly. But, this is, you’re totally right, and this shows that I still have a little bit of a mindset of separation because to me, it had been super easy working with them. I love teenagers, and I love the… I feel that teenagers, to me, are a little bit like cats, that you need to create a particular connection for them to love you and for you to love them. But, this is a real challenge. And, when you achieve this, the connection is magical. And, you’re right. I felt it a challenge because the context was a school, but the connection is making me, it’s providing me with such a joy and pleasure. Yep.

Alec Patton:
That’s awesome. Thank you so much.

Eduard Vallory:
Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to learn from you again.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, it’s a pleasure to talk to you. High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Hershel. We’ve got a link to Eduard’s book, Aprendre, in the show notes. Unfortunately, for the time being, it’s only available in Catalan. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back in the new year.