Euclid and the competencies

The great paradox of PISA is that, despite being a test designed to measure competencies, the best results are obtained by countries that focus on knowledge (as seen in the difference between England, on one hand, and Scotland and Wales, on the other).

When Euclid presented his Elements –one of the great intellectual constructions of humanity– to Ptolemy I Soter, he asked him if all that knowledge could be easily attained. Euclid replied: “Sir, there is no royal road to geometry”.

Ptolemy wanted a method that would make him quickly competent without having to travel the rough path of study. He would have liked to obtain knowledge without paying the price of insistent attention and methodical concentration, and Euclid could have tried to win the monarch's favor by doing what we do: dumbing down the content. But he did not let himself be intimidated. The Elements were up to the level of whoever wanted to conquer them intellectually, whether slave or king.

This anecdote has survived for two thousand years, but today we might be witnessing its end. To save the student the effort, we would gamify the Elements.

Euclid's response to Ptolemy has a double meaning. On one hand, a sage of humble origin tells the successor to the pharaohs that if he wants to know geometry, he must follow the same path as the rest of mortals. On the other, he reminds the plebeians that they have geometry within their reach if they submit to the rigor of its procedures, which is the rigor of the democracy of knowledge. Nevertheless, there was a certain dignity in Ptolemy I Soter. A modern-day Ptolemy's first response would be to ask: “And what is this for?”

In 2011, when screens had good press, a secretary of state for Education maintained at an event of the College of Doctors and Licentiates that there were teachers so determined to perform Hamlet that they did not realize the scenery behind their backs had been changed: now, instead of Elsinore Castle, there was a McDonald’s. That is to say, we should replace the Elements with a fast book. I thought then, and I maintain now, that whoever chooses an inferior good (equity by lowering the bar) and rejects a superior good (the development of the students' highest capacities) acts immorally. As Ortega said, "the ultimate immorality is this inverted preference that exalts mediocrity and rejects the optimum in the name of a false morality".

Returning to Euclid, what I like most about his anecdote is that he does not impose any external duty on knowledge (no competition). He considers that striving to know dignifies us and provides us with experiences of rigor, order, neatness, and beauty (experiences that, according to the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, are the proper way to take care of our soul).

Surely no one aspires to have an incompetent youth, but it is evident that the competency-based theory has increased teacher bureaucracy, confusion in faculty meetings, disparity in inspectors' criteria, and the use of sophisticated language that families do not understand. The result is a disturbing teacher malaise, a decline in knowledge, and the growing recourse of families to shadow education because they do not get enough at school.

Of all the factors that intervene in learning, the most important one, undoubtedly, is prior knowledge, which is enriched by expanding previous knowledge. This is good news, because if cultural poverty is socially constructed, we will also be able to build its school compensation.

Today the relevance of prior knowledge is manifested in our ability to ask the right questions to artificial intelligence. But learning how to ask requires knowing. What can one ask about a subject that is completely unknown? If we are sailing off the coast of Santander, it will be more useful to ask the AI for a nautical chart of the Cantabrian bay than a road map of Malaga... provided that we are capable of reading a nautical chart.

The difference between knowing and not knowing how to ask is called criteria. And the useful criteria is mine, not the AI's. For this reason, the most relevant thing is not knowing what we can do with knowledge, but what knowledge can do to us. AI will do what any other anthropological prosthesis does: amplify what each person already is.

I imagine that those reluctant about knowledge (those who continue to ideally travel to Finland hoping to find there what it has never been able to offer us) might throw at me: "Okay, hitting the books works in practice... but does it work in theory?"