The most important thing in the parliamentary debate on education, opportunely forced by Junts, was heard from the mouth of Pere Aragonès in the first minute of his speech: the school cannot do everything.
One imagined that after confessing the limitations, the president would question the plenary about what should be done in educational centers: guarantee the successful transmission of knowledge. But not. The plenary session was designed from the government’s perspective to open an aesthetic fault between the dismissed minister, Josep Gonzàlez-Cambray, and the new head of the department, Anna Simó. A change of scenery and actors to continue interpreting the same work with a very slight variation in the chords.
Fortunately, this time the hollow phrases that have served to undermine the basic foundations of school learning were not heard in the chamber. Like the usual learning to learn or that the important thing is not to know things, but to know where to look for them. In this, a healthy improvement is being noticed. You no longer stick out your chest so it doesn’t work, even if you continue to bet on it. At least, although the best-financed educational lobbies continue where they always have been, legislators are beginning to be ashamed according to what statements, after verifying that our schoolchildren read, write and solve mathematical problems with worse results from year to year.
The new Minister Simó is right when she affirms that the rankings must not be consecrated and that the data, however bad they may be, must be thoroughly analyzed before drawing hasty conclusions. TRUE. Perhaps it is better to ask university professors with what level of basic skills high school students reach them or inquire of high school teachers how girls coming from secondary school reach them. Or to the ESO teachers with what solidly acquired knowledge they receive the youngsters who come from primary school. In those answers there is more information than in all the rankings published and to be published. Only that it invites much greater pessimism.
Coincidences, bravo!, among the majority of the parliamentary groups on the excessive administrative burden of teachers. Something that takes them away from their main function: teaching. The phrase of the PSC deputy, Esther Niubó, about the overwhelming weight of Via Augusta (the street where the department’s headquarters is located) in the day-to-day life of the centers is hygienic. For a long time now, the thinking head of the system, the council, has been seen more as an enemy than an ally by the nucleus of the educational community: the teachers and the directors of the centers. She thought maybe she can sweeten the situation, reversing it seems difficult. Too many people who have never stepped foot in a classroom in their lives, or who have done everything possible to escape from it, inventing the wheel on a daily basis and pretending to illustrate the teachers who do continue teaching at the foot of the canyon. Or trying.
In La educación cancelada (Episteme Foundation, 2022), a compilation of articles by sixteen educational experts of all ideologies, there is a distressing coincidence: the transmission of knowledge has been devalued to such an extent in schools, thanks to the prevalence of hypotheses educational without scientific endorsement, that the end result could not be other than what unfortunately we now have on our hands. While we debate about the early school leaving of students -a major issue-, we close our eyes to a reality, if possible, more dramatic: the school as a motor of deep learning, itself abandoning the students to their fate.
But that was not debated in Parliament, or only between the lines. Perhaps because, without distinction of acronyms, doing so would force a severe amendment to the policies of the last decades and whose responsibility goes far beyond the Generalitat. The progressive sacralization of the mess, from Logse (1990) to Lomloe (2020), is the work of the Cortes. If Catalonia is doing worse than other places, it is only because it has insisted on being the most outstanding student of a mess. And yes, also because this is a much more complex society than others, with problems that did not exist before and that continue to worsen. 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 basics. That they let him do what he can and should: teach.
