It turns out that now, thanks to the cumulative effort of decades of educational psychology and countless educational reforms, we are on our way to becoming a country of mediocre people. The results that one study after another should give us all, politicians, teachers and families, are truly terrifying. This time it is the PIRLS 2021. If the data that was known a few days ago was already bad for the whole of Spain, where the drop in reading comprehension of children in 4th grade (10-11 years old) drops seven points in five years, in Catalonia it is even worse, with a drop of 15 points.
We can spend five, ten, fifteen more years hiding behind the pandemic or the suffering “is that it happens throughout Europe”, or do something to get out of the group of idiots. Being in the caboose in education leads us to an irreversible social failure. If 10-year-olds don’t understand what they read, they don’t understand anything. A sad landscape is drawn in the future. Again the metaphor of the tree that grows crooked. And the ESO will not fix the disaster of the primary. On the contrary. Other studies confirm the failure of ESO, that model that consists not in raising the level of students to excellence, but in lowering the level of excellence to mediocrity.
To prolong such an exciting miracle [irony], there is the Baccalaureate and then a Selectividad that no longer selects. It happens then that the students are dragging, stage after stage until the FP or the University, that bad habit of not understanding anything they read.
If we talk about Catalonia, the lesson should be more than learned. It repeats the terrible data since 2016, only comparable now in Ceuta and Melilla. In the detailed analysis of the PIRLS report, it can be seen that there are more students in the low ranges of reading comprehension and fewer in the high ones. That is to say that not only the schoolchildren who have a harder time do worse, but also the more advantaged ones. A drama. Everyone is penalized whatever their ability.
This should make us think about three aspects. The first, what and how is taught. There has been some relaxation in teaching literacy, the mother of all subjects, in the classroom and also at home. Read, read and read (and not just ‘stories’ from Instagram or TikTok).
Two, one wonders to what extent the public system in Catalonia does not know how to accommodate the arrival of immigrants in full swing. I suspect that the problem is not one of budget.
And three. A debate that has been muted in recent years is the one that questions ESO and proposes returning to the EGB-BUP-COU model or, if not, to a similar one with compulsory schooling up to 14 years of age but with itineraries and tests according to the ability of the student. Let’s give volume to the debate, why not. In any case, the solution cannot be to call below.
Under the commendable idea that no one is left behind, the centers have become less formative and more problematic, while the demand is lowered to make it possible for the laggards to advance in the course and those who are forced to study beyond the age of 13. Compensating for excesses causes more inequity, starting in Primary School, because only parents with financial or family resources can assume the corrective factor outside the classroom. Not to mention the psycho-emotional effects of jumping from school to high school for a pre-adolescent – ​​burning a stage of childhood – and living with kids up to five years older.
The tree that grows crooked never straightens.
