'Fashion pedagogy'

“In teaching, it has become fashionable to adopt new and fanciful ideas, and many young teachers are carried away by the mistaken notion that unless a method is new, it cannot be the best. However, it is well to remember that change does not necessarily imply progress. Every method must be subjected, first, to the laws of common sense applied to the development of the child’s mind, and, second, to the test of actual classroom experience, before it can be considered the best method, or even a good method”. This paragraph is extracted from page 105 of a book published in New York in 1885 and titled The Eclectic Manual of Methods for the Assistance of Teachers. Any sensible person knows that the new and the good are different categories and that they can coincide or diverge. But in education, as the American pedagogue Robert Pondiscio recently said, “stability is easily confused with complacency or indifference. Therefore, schools reward the appearance of change over real improvement.” These words may seem exaggerated, but if I review my teaching experience since the early 70s, what I see is a kind of St. Vitus' dance of novelties that present themselves with a lot of promises under their arm, but which expire in four or five years. The usual thing is that the change has not been approved for being the technical answer to a problem, but because it allows us to show ourselves full of comforting vitality.And what if to improve Catalan schools the first thing we need is to cure our addiction to miracle solutions?According to Pondiscio, the reasons that explain the vulnerability of schools to phosphorescent ideas are four: The first is the weakness of our evaluation and feedback systems, which hinders an objective view of our results. There are so many variables at play in an educational center that it is very difficult to identify the specific responsibility of each one in the running of the center. The cause-and-effect relationship is never entirely clear, and where we discover correlations that align with our ideology, we tend to see causation.

The second is of a political nature: there is no minister or education counselor who does not arrive at their office with more will to be a founder than a continuator. They want to leave their mark on their actions. But among so many laws, so much regulation, and so much difference between inspectors when applying it, the collective orientation is lost. The third is the fascination with innovation. If a method is presented as innovative, it can save itself the empirical justification of its goodness.The fourth: Teachers live in a permanent moral impatience. Every day they are met with the open and questioning eyes of their students. It is not surprising, therefore, that if the creators of a method claim it benefits children with difficulties, it seems immoral to us to ignore it, even if we lack the data to prove its goodness.I'll add another one from my own harvest: the laxity of pedagogical vocabulary. There are few pedagogical concepts that withstand rigorous logical analysis. But if they sound good... Daniel Dennett called deepities claims that seem profound because they sound good, but are actually empty. A deepity has two readings. In the first, its falsity is clear, but at the same time we cannot help but think that if it were true, it would be very important. In the second, we discover that its truth is trivial and leads us nowhere. And here comes moral impatience. It is trivial, but we wish it weren't, and then we let ourselves be carried away by the illusion of depth. An example: “The child at the center”. If we refer to a generic child, this is true, but trivial. If we refer to each child, we know it is necessary, but impossible. A class cannot accommodate 25 centers. In conclusion: there is nothing more predictable than the instability of our educational system. As it is believed to be a bearer of good moral reasons, it tends to be evaluated more by the height of its good intentions than by that of its results.Novice schools may attract a lot of attention occasionally, but it's seasonal window-dressing attention. What is truly admirable in education is not fleeting success, but sustained progress, and this is usually the result of a combination of good sense, reflective practices, calm supervision of inevitable mistakes, and a well-structured curriculum. Some, perhaps, will believe this is not much, but do we have anything better?