It turns out that now, and thanks to the accumulated effort of decades of psychopedagogy and three hundred educational reforms, we are on our way to becoming a country of mediocres. The results of one study after another should make us all, politicians, teachers and families, really panic. This time it’s Pirls. If the data was already bad for Spain as a whole, where the drop in reading comprehension of 4th grade children (10-11 years old) drops seven points in five years, in Catalonia it is even more serious, with a drop of fifteen points
We can spend five, ten, fifteen more years shielding ourselves from the pandemic or suffering “it’s happening all over Europe”, or do something to get out of the Capsigrany group. Being in the tailgate in education leads us to 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. ESO will not fix the disaster of primary school. On the contrary Many other studies confirm the failure of ESO, that model which 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 [it’s irony], there is high school and then a selectivity that no longer selects. It happens after the students are dragging, stage after stage until the vocational training or the university, this bad habit of not understanding anything they read.
If we talk about Catalonia, the lesson should be learned. It falls back on the terrible data from 2016, comparable only to 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. In other words, it is not only worse for the students who have the most trouble, but also for the most advantaged. Everyone comes out penalized, whatever their ability.
This should make us reflect on three aspects. The first: what and how is taught. There has been some relaxation in the teaching of reading and writing, the mother of all subjects, in the classroom and also at home. Read, read and read (and not just Instagram or TikTok stories).
Second: one wonders to what extent the public system in Catalonia does not know how to accommodate the arrival of immigrants in the middle of the school year. I suspect the problem is not budget, this time.
And third: a debate that has been muted in recent years is the one that questions the ESO and proposes to return to the EGB-BUP-COU model or, if not, to a similar one with compulsory schooling until the age of 14 but with itineraries and tests according to the student’s ability. We give volume to the debate. The solution cannot be to equalize below.
Under the laudable idea that no one is left behind, the centers have become less formative and more problematic, while the demand is lowered to advance those who cost them the most or, simply, who are forced to study beyond the 13. Compensating for excesses causes more inequity, already from primary school, because only parents with financial or family resources can assume the corrective factor outside the classroom. And we are not talking about the psycho-emotional effects of skipping high school – burning a stage of childhood – and living with boys up to five years older for a pre-adolescent. The tree that grows crooked never straightens.
