The statement yesterday of a survivor of the Andes plane crash surprised the presenter of a Cuatro program. That perhaps the practice of rugby had not been decisive in his salvation? "Yes, of course, because of the team spirit", answered the first on the day Juan Antonio Bayona's La sociedad de la nieve was nominated for the Oscar for best international film. Then, he 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 Asturias Princess of Communication and Humanities, smile. Author of the essay La utilitat de l'inútil, he was a defender of education focused on "knowing", and not on "knowing how to do", which translated into bureaucratic neo-language would be "competencies".
This talisman concept, that of competences, 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: nobody was very surprised by the results of the Pisa report. The reactions of government officials at regional and national level, as well as the corresponding oppositions, were also predictable: silence accompanied by the hasty creation of expert commissions to find miraculous recipes with a quick effect, as well as the usual distribution of accusations Education has been a spearhead weapon since the transition. The President of the Spanish Government also took advantage of the agreement and announced a sudden shower of millions of euros in an event during the Galician pre-campaign, as if with this he could get mathematicians to appear out of nowhere with a vocation capable of driving away - those from the private sector, better paid. There was no lack of condescension from Sánchez when he advertised a reinforcement plan in mathematics and reading comprehension for being "hard to chew" subjects.
The reluctance of the political class to subject 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 respondents . You only need to look at the tangle of acronyms of the successive educational reforms, each one covering up the failures of the previous one, which both teachers and students have had to face. If I look back, from the time 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. What is enviable about this small Baltic country is not the resources it has, which are limited, but the clarity of ideas, which combines agreed upon basic principles with a commitment to digitization programs (although not technocredulous). Estonia, moreover, started with serious disadvantages: having a minority language as the 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 socio-economic differences do not determine students' performance. 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", so 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 occupied by Spain (and Catalonia) 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 in its set As Andreu Navarra points out in his book Prohibido aprender (Anagrama, 2021), "when we talk about content that needs to be transmitted, the focus must be on adults, because youth is formed from what we adults consider to be worth worth learning". Unfortunately, in Spain reading comprehension came to be considered useless.
