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 don't know if the schedule will be met, but we do know, because he has promised it, that we will have the ninth so that the PP will govern again.
Considering the legislative prolixity, we should infer that education, whatever the ideological accent of our rulers, occupies and worries. But such dedication has not yielded the expected results. This is confirmed by the new PISA report: we are going from bad to worse. And while it is true that mushrooms are made everywhere, we should add that in Catalonia nothing else is made.
The Generalitat, in a first assessment that it rectified yesterday, has attributed the failure to the excessive weight of immigrant students in the report's samples. Discounting these students, the results remain dismal. But the fact that the argument of the Secretary of Educational Policies of the Government, Ignasi Garcia Plata, is not true does not completely invalidate it. 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 year after year. Integrating and integrating is not an easy task. There are schools in Catalonia that function more as social welfare centers than as educational centers.
Among the popular Catalan classes it was used when illiteracy, real or functional, was common currency, the now obsolete expression saber de letra to refer to someone who could read, write and be smart with numbers . In wealthy families this was taken for granted. But for those who lived in precariousness, knowing how to write meant access to a passport that made a better life possible. Those who preceded us knew what we knew without the help of artificial intelligence: that the best investment to nuance the differences of the cradle and to build step by step a society in which equal opportunities were not just talk empty was about access to a good education. To know the letter.
For this reason, the fact that Catalan students have lost knowledge equivalent to 24 months in 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 holy grail of modern pedagogy, is not only paradoxical. By now it's almost insulting.
The report will cause more work for the educational community. What is foreseeable now is that an educational shock plan will be activated, or at least announced. That voices appear demanding a new national pact for education. That the need to increase investment be insisted upon and that it be promised that sooner or later the results will arrive. All this will result in more useless training for teachers and, as always, more bureaucratic burden. Equally, the pedagogical lobbies, far from rectifying, will insist that the bad results are due to a lack of ambition in the implementation of the ideas they have been promoting for a long time: more education for skills!, more learning to learn and less studying! We will continue to give joy to the hardware and software companies that help so much to disguise the structural shortcomings of our educational centers. As you can see, it all boils down to the same thing: if it's new – whether it's pedagogy, an electronic whiteboard or a method of assessment – it can't be bad. But if it moves.
That Spain and Catalonia have obtained the worst results since the PISA report debuted in 2000 is an urgent invitation to rectification. But the pedagogy, don't doubt it, will find a way not to get off the donkey. It will be in the name of a great educational revolution that has already demonstrated its failure. The most reactionary revolution of all.
