The most important thing in the parliamentary debate on education, forced at the right time by Junts, was heard from the mouth of Pere Aragonès just at the beginning of his intervention: the school cannot do everything. One would imagine that after the confession of the limitations, the president would ask the plenary about what must be done in educational centers: guaranteeing the successful transmission of knowledge. But no. The meeting was designed from the government’s point of view to open an aesthetic gap between the dismissed councillor, Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray, and the new head of the department, Anna Simó. A change of scenery and actors to continue interpreting the same play with a very slight variation in the chords.
Fortunately, this time the empty sentences that have served to undermine the basic foundations of school learning were not heard in the chamber. Like the well-worn “learn to learn” or that “the important thing is not to know things, but to know where to look for them”. A healthy improvement is seen at this point. At least you don’t get upset about what doesn’t work anymore, even if you continue to persist in the same thing. Even if the most well-funded educational lobbies remain impassive as always, the deputies are starting to be embarrassed according to what claims. Especially after realizing that our schoolchildren read, write and solve mathematical problems with increasingly worse results from year to year.
The new councilor Simó is right when she says that the rankings should not be sacralized and that the data, no matter how bad, must be thoroughly analyzed before drawing hasty conclusions. right Perhaps it’s better to ask university professors what level of basic skills high school students arrive at, or ask high school teachers about the knowledge they start working with high school students. Or to the ESO teachers they meet when they receive the youngsters who have come from primary school. There will be more information in these answers than in all published and to be published rankings. Only it will invite even greater pessimism.
Coincidences, bravo!, between the majority of parliamentary groups on the excessive administrative burden on teachers. This issue takes them away from their main function: teaching. Hygienic is the sentence of the deputy of the PSC, Esther Niubó, about the suffocating weight of Via Augusta (the street where the headquarters of the department is located) in the day-to-day life of educational centers. It has been a long time since the brain of the system, the ministry, has been perceived more as an enemy than as an ally by the core of the educational community: the teachers and the schools’ managements. Simó will be able to sugarcoat the situation; reversing it is very complicated. Too many people who have never set foot in a classroom in their life, or who have done their best to escape, inventing the wheel every day and trying to enlighten the teachers who do continue to teach. Or trying to.
In La educación cancelada (Fundació Episteme, 2022), a compilation of articles by sixteen educational experts of all ideologies, one notices a distressing coincidence between them: the transmission of knowledge has been devalued to such an extent in schools, thanks to the prevalence of educational hypotheses without scientific support, that the final result could not be other than what we unfortunately now have in our hands. While we debate about premature school leaving by students – a major issue – we close our eyes to an even more dramatic reality: the school as an engine of deep learning, leaving the students themselves to their fate.
This was not discussed in Parliament, or only between the lines. Perhaps because, without distinction of acronyms, doing so would force a severe amendment of the policies of the last decades, the responsibility of which goes beyond the Generalitat. The progressive sacralization of desgavell, from Logse (1990) to Lomloe (2020), is the work of the Corts. If Catalonia is doing worse than other places, it is only because it has become obsessed with being the best student for a reason. And yes, also because this is a much more complex society than others, with problems that didn’t exist before and that keep getting bigger. But for this very reason it is necessary to return to Pere Aragonès: the school cannot do everything. So maybe you should start over with the most basic. Let him do what he can and must do: teach.
