Still humiliated, as a Catalan, father and modest associate professor, by the zero we have been given in the PISA tests, I review the lessons of pedagogues and teachers in 25 years of interviews in order to approve the ones to come:
1) The Finnish professor Timo Riiho (Finland obtained for years the best PISA rating from the OECD and this year it was third out of the 81 countries evaluated) told me: “In Finland we demand more than you from those who want to be teachers” ( La Contra, 14/I/2012). Finnish primary school teachers are required to have a degree in Pedagogy and another specific degree: Exacts, Physics, Biology, Linguistics… They have to master, in addition to Finnish, English and, in the bilingual region, Swedish . Finland enjoys a consensus that has depoliticized its education system and here we have had eight educational reforms since 1980. (Riiho came to give a conference and refused to be paid for the trip, because “I will also do tourism”).
2) The Portuguese Minister of Education (from 2011 to 2015) Nuno Crato (La Contra, 6/VI/ 2022) managed to raise Portugal 44 places in the Pisa test… Paying teachers more? Giving more holidays? On the contrary: he demanded more from students and teachers under the premise “What you don’t evaluate doesn’t improve”, with a structured program – it’s mathematical and statistical – and increasing the demand for knowledge.
And he warned us that not suspending anyone – those of us who examine know this too well – is suspending everyone. Not incentivising, demanding and evaluating equally, as advocated by the bellicose bonism, is to promote inequality and reduce opportunities for advancement for the poor, since the rich already maintain their private social ladder to continue to be so.
3) Demand is a friend of excellence and only by distributing it equally can it be achieved, as Antonio Gramsci pointed out, that the best, whatever their origin (especially if they are immigrants who give us the opportunity for cultural diversity), come one day to serve us all. So… Let’s study, examine ourselves, more school days, evaluate! Or emigrate one day with a useless degree in your pocket to another country that knew how to educate better. Or to serve its inhabitants beers when they come on vacation.
