The schooling of Gypsy children has become a major challenge for the Spanish educational system. After centuries of, first, exclusion and then segregation in separate schools, an egalitarian policy and a sudden enforcement of compulsory schooling have resulted in difficulties and conflicts in numerous Spanish schools. The specificity of the Gypsy way of life, paradoxically, brings to light the arbitrariness of the school system, i.e. its dependence on a particular culture and way of life marked by nation-state, market economy, wage labour, sedentariness, nuclear family, rule of formal law, etc. After the initial stages of exclusion and segregation, educational policy towards Gypsies is now going through a reinterpretation of the idea of equality, departing from formal egalitarianism to arrive at some form of multiculturalism. Yet this reinterpretation is always on the basis of an external appraisal of the needs and opportunities of this ethnic minority by different professional groups. (Contains 2 notes.)