Spain has given birth to eight educational laws since 1980. One every five years on average. The next one, to comply with the statistics, should be approved in 2025. We do not know if the calendar will be met, but we do know, because it has been promised, that we will have the ninth as soon as the PP returns to govern.
Considering the legislative prolixity, we should conclude that education, whatever the ideological accent of our rulers, occupies and worries. It's just that so much dedication has not produced the expected results. This is confirmed by the new PISA report: we are going from bad to worse. And being true that beans are cooked everywhere, we should add that in Catalonia nothing else is cooked.
The Government, in a first assessment that it rectified yesterday, has attributed the debacle to the excessive weight of immigrant students in the report's samples. Discounting those students, the results are still dismal. But the fact that the argument of the Secretary of Educational Policies of the Government, Ignasi Garcia Plata, is not true does not invalidate it in its entirety. It is enough to talk to the teachers, the great absentee in the permanent debate about the school, to make sure that this problem not only exists, but is getting worse every year. Integrating and integrating is not an easy task. There are schools in Catalonia that function more like social welfare centers than educational centers.
Among the Catalan popular classes, the now obsolete expression saber de lletra was used when illiteracy, real or functional, was common currency, to refer to someone who knew how to read, write and deal with numbers. In wealthy families that was taken for granted. But for those who lived in precarious conditions, knowing lletra meant access to a passport that made a better life possible. Those who preceded us knew what we did without the help of artificial intelligence: that the best investment to clarify the differences of birth and to build step by step a society in which equal opportunities were not just empty talk was through access to a good education. For knowing the lyrics.
Therefore, the fact that Catalan students have lost knowledge equivalent to 24 months of reading and 18 in mathematics and science since the previous report three years ago is the most harmful and regressive thing we could do to them, especially to the less socially advantaged. We are building a worse Catalonia and Spain. More classist and less fair. That this is done in good faith and in the name of progressivism and egalitarianism, the watchword of the pedagogocracy of modernity, is not only paradoxical. At this point it is almost insulting.
The report will cause extra work for the educational community. What is foreseeable now is that an educational shock plan will be activated, or at least announced. Let voices appear demanding a new national pact for education. Insist on the need to increase investment and promise that results will arrive sooner rather than later. All of this will result in more useless training for teachers and, as always, also more bureaucratic burden. Likewise, the pedagogical lobbies, far from rectifying, will insist that the poor results are due to the lack of ambition in the implementation of the ideas that they have been promoting for a long time: more education by skills!, more learning to learn and less study! We will continue to bring joy to the hardware and software companies that help so much to disguise the structural deficiencies of our educational centers. As you can see, all of this refers to the same thing: if it is new – be it the pedagogy, an electronic whiteboard or a way of evaluating – it cannot be bad. Eppur does move.
That Spain and Catalonia have obtained the worst results since the PISA report debuted in 2000 is an urgent invitation to rectification. But pedagogocracy, do not doubt it, will find a way to sustain it and not amend it. He will do so in the name of a great educational revolution that has already demonstrated its failure. The most reactionary revolution of all.
