The statement yesterday from a survivor of the plane crash in the Andes surprised the presenter of a Cuatro program. Hadn't rugby practice been decisive in his salvation? “Yes, of course, because of the team spirit,” responded the first on the day when The Snow Society by Juan Antonio Bayona was nominated for the Oscar for best international film. He then insisted that not all of them were players and that what was really crucial was the educational level of that group of young people: one had knowledge of medicine, another of physics, geography or history. According to him, it was all this knowledge that was fundamental in making decisions. These words would surely have made the recently deceased Nuccio Ordine, last Princess of Asturias of Communication and Humanities, smile. Author of the essay The Usefulness of the Useless, he was a defender of education focused on “knowing”, and not on “knowing how”, which translated into bureaucratic newspeak would be “skills”.
This talismanic concept, that of competencies, is at the center of the educational theories that the Ministry of Education has embraced and uncritically turned into law. But let's be clear: no one was too surprised by the results of the PISA report. The reactions of government officials at the regional and national levels, as well as the corresponding oppositions, were also predictable: silence accompanied by the hasty creation of commissions of experts to find miraculous recipes with a quick effect, as well as the well-known distribution of accusations. Education has been a weapon since the transition. The President of the Government also entered the fray and announced a sudden rain of millions of euros in an event during the Galician pre-campaign, as if with this he were going to get mathematicians to emerge out of nowhere whose vocation for the classroom would keep them away from the private sector, better paid. There was no lack of Sánchez's condescension when advertising a reinforcement plan in mathematics and reading comprehension because they are “tough to crack” subjects.
The political class's aversion to subjecting education to a deep and plural debate is reflected in the latest CIS barometer, which places education in 13th place on the list of main problems in Spain for those surveyed. You only have to look at the tangle of successive educational reforms, each one covering up the failures of the previous one, which both teachers and students have had to overcome. If I look back, from when I started the EGB until I obtained the Pedagogical Aptitude Course, I count about six, from the Logse to the LOCE, and since then there have been three more.
I make these reflections after reading an interview with Kristina Kallas, the Minister of Education of Estonia, the “new Finland” in the PISA tests. The enviable thing about this small Baltic country is not the limited resources it has at its disposal, but rather the clarity of ideas, which combines basic agreed principles with a commitment to digitalization programs (although not techno-credulous). Estonia, furthermore, started with serious disadvantages: having a minority language as its vehicular language, the reconstruction of its educational system after the fall of the Soviet Union or, recently, the incorporation of 5% of Ukrainian refugee students. However, they have managed to ensure that socioeconomic differences do not determine the performance of their students. Faced with the temptation to imitate them, Kallas is categorical: “The historical context of each educational system plays an important role.” In their case, “schools form the nucleus around which communities develop,” which is why they reinforce the autonomy of the centers. His ministry “supports,” rather than “controls.” The only exportable thing, according to her, is the training of schools and teachers.
If the place that Spain (and Catalonia) occupies in the classification of an international organization with its own agenda is uncomfortable, it is because the quality of the educational system serves as a mirror, not so much for young people and teachers as for society as a whole. As Andreu Navarra points out in his book Forbidden to Learn (Anagrama, 2021), “when talking about content to transmit, the focus must be on adults, because youth is formed from what adults consider worthwhile. learn". Unfortunately, in Spain reading comprehension came to be considered useless.
