The writer, screenwriter and casting director, Cristina Campos, became a finalist for the 2022 Planeta Prize a few days ago with a novel, Historias de mujeres casadas, in which critics intuit that the author has "undressed" her own soul. Like all talented people, and leaving aside the novel that earned her the award, Campos has managed to go further and lay bare not only her soul: she has laid bare our educational system.
His voice did not tremble when he sought to address, from among the audience attending the awards gala, the Minister of Education, and before her, before everyone! uncover, openly but with exquisite kindness, what would sum up her own academic career, by the way, not at all intuitable: “I was a disastrous student”.
For me, an educator and director at a school in Barcelona for years, the headline was already served: “I was a disastrous student”. This end of the intervention of the finalist writer and what could be read in it, should be enough as an incentive to reach the global educational pact; to graft our educational system on a paradigm that safeguards, once and for all, the multiple intelligences with which we are born; so as not to put only the interest of the reforms that should bet on educational quality, only in details and curricular varnishes but that deep down continue to be a mere education as if we were still in the s. XIX.
That culmination of the writer in the middle of the Planeta Awards gala should be enough so that, ultimately, all of us who, with more or less experience, teach at the classroom level, would manage to do a good pedagogical examination of conscience: How many Cristinas Campos have we not been able to see or accompany? How many will we not be seeing?
What Campos shared in a way that was as sensitive as normal in his speech was simply the experience of not having felt recognized as a person who learns from the diversity of modes and rhythms. Once again, this blatant story of school failure, like so many others, should lead us to believe that every child, every adolescent is intelligent; bet not only on a new way of understanding education but on a set of solutions and opportunities that will help the student to be the owner of their own learning process from their talents and what they are passionate about. Thus and only thus, we will educate, and not despite ourselves or despite our praxis!, the next finalist, or winner, of the upcoming Planeta Awards. The call is open.
