Education in Spain: Too young to decide

(or how I became an engineer that knew nothing about Economics)

I can't even remember when was the last time I had a class about Economy... I'm not sure I even had one, actually. Maybe it was back in the day, when I was in grade 9th or 10th (3º o 4º ESO), as I remember that our geography teacher used to talk about things here and there, not really following the book. Probably I was too busy thinking about girls, or how to be cool, as most teenagers... Well, to be honest, I think I mostly cared about playing soccer, riding my bike or reading video games and computer magazines... Anyways, I'm getting off the point with these already blurry memories of my dorky years of high school...
I want to make a reference to the Educational System in which I was brought up, about how by making us decide about our future at a very young age, some of us never had a chance to taste a little bit of here and there, and what's worse, how we totally lack (at least I do, and I can tell you I wasn't at the bottom of my class) a good background knowledge about some subjects that I consider essential for any student, for its individual development.
In my opinion, the System experimented with the education that my generation (and some others) received in our years of secondary education (1996-2000). Let's call it by its popular name, "LOGSE" (acronym of that Law of Education). It was very polemical, a lot of people said it was too ambitious, that it was impossible to accomplish its goals because it didn't have enough funding (meaning that there was just not enough money for teachers and materials that were required to meet its objectives of a more "personalized" teaching). However, that's not what I want to discuss here. That law (passed by a PSOE government) was subsequently replaced by the LOCE (during PP government) and recently again by the LOE (now PSOE is back in power), and there is a huge problem in Spain with Education, to the extreme we used to have the highest drop-out rate in the entire EU (at least before the EU of the 25), and probably we are still in the bottom of the list. Again, getting off the point...
This is where I want to get: At a very young age (16, at the end of 4º ESO, our "Junior High"), we Spanish kids who wanted to continue studying in High School had to choose pretty much what we were going to do in our lives. Or at least, make a decision that would most likely influence the rest of our lives. So, that summer, when we signed up for high school, we had to put an X on one of four options, according to the itinerary that we wanted to go into: Humanities, Social Science, Science-Engineering or Health and Earth Sciences. Once in one path, the courses we'd take over the following two years would be very different from the others branches, and the final tests that gave you access to university (we called it "Selectividad" although its real name was P.A.U.) would be about those subjects. So, if you took Science-Engineering, as I did, you'd never have to worry again about certain subjects (Art, Philosophy...) that are not "of relevance" for your "career". (obviously I'm not reflecting my opinion with this. Without diminishing any other discipline, there is one particular subject, Economy, that it should definitely be a part of anyone's curriculum through their high school or university education. In my humble opinion, there is a heck of a lot of people out there (amongst which I'm included) that know very little about this issue. Let's say that, as an example, the stock market is understood by many as something like this :)


If you ever wanted to go into a University program totally out of your specialization, you were more than free to do it (although I don't remember if you were ranked fairly in comparison with the guys from the "right branch", according to your marks). The thing is that, even if you coud do it, once you had studied all those Math, Physics and Chemistry stuff, and passed all those freaking difficult tests, going into Art History, Economics or Business seemed kind of a mistake (considering that you lacked all background knowledge that other people from the "right branch" had).
That said, the way Degrees are designed in the Spanish Universities doesn't fix that gap at all. If you go into Computer Science (CS), that's what you learn. No Bio, no Econ, no nothing. You learn the stuff you need to be a programmer, a database or system administrator, or whatever. And we learn plenty of it, very broad, very general, in many fields, so that we later on are able to specialize within any area of computer science. I appreciate that broad basis in my CS education. But, what about "the other stuff"? You know, the non-CS stuff? Yes, I did learn more about Physics, about Math, because they basics and are required for many things in CS. But, what about Economics? Language? Business? Environment? Sociology?
In Spain, there are no such things as Majors and Minors, double Majors... You just can't graduate in two things (for example, Sociology and Environmental Studies, or Business and Engineering, or Biology and Spanish), but only one. If you want CS, study 5 years. If after that, you want Economics, take another 3 or 5 years. OK that tuition is relatively cheap in Spain (when I studied, around 600/EUR year), but people can't just take 8 or 10 years of their life studying in University (I mean, some people do it, but clearly not the majority)
So, here I am. A PhD student in CS, and pretty much no knowledge at all about things that should be basics. It's true I could have learnt it by myself, yes. I assume my part of guilt. But the truth is that during my University years, I was dedicated full time to my courses, which took my entire time, and sometimes more... And I can tell you I didn't read Adam Smith in my spare time...

This leaves me, as many other people both with and without University degrees, with a very, very minimal knowledge on some important subjects. As I mentioned, one of them is Economy: People talk all the time about the economy, it is on the news, on the electoral campaign... Growth, deficit, inflation, external debt, interest rates, euro/dollar currency exchange, federal reserve, IMF, WB, ECB, supply/demand, WTO, NAFTA, mortgages, loans... All these things, people like my had to learn 'ad-hoc', and most of the times its meaning is not really clear, and neither it is their inter-relationships.
I remember this moment of eager learning during one after-meal, when I had my friend Juan (he studied Business Administration) answering my questions about all kind of economy-related stuff. But I just couldn't draw the big picture from a few of its comments. If, on top of that, you put those few "shadowy issues" we all have heard about, the picture gets really confusing and doesn't make much sense.