FPA Beniassent

FPA Beniassent is an education centre for adults that provides formal and non-formal education to men and women from 18 years onwards. It is situated in two little towns, Cocentaina and Muro, in the Autonomic Valencian Region in the south-east of Spain.

We offer a wide diversity of courses: formal levels of education from literacy to Secondary School (second opportunity), Spanish language for immigrants, preparation for other higher level studies like university entrance for adults, ICT courses in different levels, languages, drama, music, handcrafts, sports, etc.

Our target groups are:

• Young students that couldn’t get the Secondary School degree for different problems (drugs addiction, unstructured families, social exclusion…). They are young male and female students with risk of social marginalisation.
• People between 30 and 50 with basic studies that want to improve their qualification in order to get a job or a better job improving their way of life.
• Senior people who want to learn the basic skills or improve it (some of them are illiterate) because they couldn’t do when they were young for economic or discrimination reasons.
• Immigrants who need to learn the language and culture of the hosting country. Most of them are illiterate women from African countries. People of all range of age that need to spend their leisure time in a creative way.

We integrate history studies in all the formal levels as a subject but furthermore we offer different complementary and extra school activities out of class for all the students at the school and many of them are related to the local, regional or national history.

Our origins come from very ancient cultures coming from the prehistoric period; some of the most important are from the Iberian culture, related to Mediterranean civilizations like Greeks or Phoenicians. We have the ruins of some important Iberian settlements very near. We also had an important Roman influence during the beginning of the Christian era. During the Middle Age, Christian people lived together with Muslims and Jewish, so we keep an important heritage from the Muslims culture.

We want to show in this project the importance of the cultural heritage in the process of construction of the current society, knowing and comparing the influence of the ancient civilizations in all Europe, so we could better understand our own culture and society and fight to preserve it for future generations.