An educational model that leads nowhere

The education system is suffering a long and profound crisis, but only those who work in it are aware of it and seem to be concerned about it. At every level, whether primary, secondary, or university, professionals are shocked by the low level and scarce motivation with which students arrive and leave. Teachers' lounges, places where discouragement has become a disease, whether in the form of burnout or depression. You must be very cynical not to experience the effects of the imposter symptom. The concept teach It has become so devalued that it forces us to maintain a ritual whose results are disappointing and almost useless. Few of the students in the classroom deserve the title of students, given that it is no longer what they do, not so much because of their responsibility as because prevailing methodologies establish that the function of educational centers is different. Knowledge has become secondary; memory, effort, and learning have been banished in favor of emotional well-being and so-called competenciesTeachers, stripped of their role and leadership, must act as facilitators of esoteric group dynamics.

The worst thing one could do is blame the boys and girls of Generation Z, who are the ones now arriving in university classrooms. They arrive with the conditions afforded them by society, their families, the educational system, and the prevailing culture. They haven't read, they don't know how to write, they have no general culture, and little organized and systematic knowledge. They claim to have many digital skills, but this is more of a problem than a virtue. Educational authorities throw up their hands when they see the results of the PISA and TIMSS reports, but if they had bothered to talk to professionals, they would have realized this years ago and could have acted accordingly. They don't seem to have a real grasp of the magnitude of the tragedy. Surrounded and held hostage by the web of interests of the prevailing psychopedagogy, administrations are unable to act and fundamentally rethink an educational model that leads nowhere beyond the triumph of holy ignorance. Screens have done a lot of damage, probably much more than we imagine, but even more so have the flawed foundations of an educational system that is the result of experts trained in postmodern relativism and who worship a false god like Michel Foucault or, even worse, an Italian fascist theorist and activist.

In university classrooms, too many students don't know why they're there and disregard the professor's academic authority. They're incapable of listening for more than ten minutes while interacting with technological devices for who knows what purpose. They have all their materials posted in virtual classrooms that turn class, in their view, into a dispensable ritual. What had been a learning environment ceased to be one long ago. To avoid problems, the demands are increasingly lower, and any evaluation system that doesn't rely on tests is nothing more than a fraud, first using Wikipedia and now ChatGPT. Everything points to making it easy, since university authorities penalize repeater rates and professors are evaluated by the surveys they answer from students. Everything aims to avoid harm, even though we're faced with a clear fraud. An extremely bureaucratic system with abundant mechanisms for self-satisfaction, but one that doesn't withstand serious critical analysis. Society is generally satisfied because everyone is provided with the university degree they aspire to for their children. This is a false notion of social advancement, because now the real selection is carried out by very expensive master's programs that continue to select based on income levels.

Meanwhile, in the classrooms, teachers deal with too many students who don't believe there's anything to learn because, they think, everything is already online, and they're not interested in what we can offer them, people who are bearers of a bookish, ancestral culture. Those who have studied literature don't know who Josep Pla is, much less that someone named Antonio Machado existed. They don't differentiate between an opinion piece and a piece of information. They don't know what a metaphor is, much less an oxymoron. It's impossible to define what enlightened reason is or what was at stake in the Spanish Civil War. I insist that this is not a personal problem for these young people, but rather a problem with the context in which they have been forced to survive excessively on cotton wool, helicopter parents, disdain for knowledge, abandonment of effort, and study as the key to learning. A world given over to appearances and wealth as a result of a stroke of luck, whether speculating in cryptocurrencies or becoming a influencerMeanwhile, the teachers escape from the classroom as much as possible and motivate themselves by making the convoluted journeys in what is pompously called academic career.