The 2025 PISA report paints a very stark picture of educational failure in the West. Within the OECD countries, which commissions the report on the science, language, and mathematics skills of fifteen-year-old students, it places Spain at the tail end in almost everything, which continues to decline report after report. A significant piece of data is that, at this age, Spanish students are one academic year behind compared to the education in Great Britain, which is not that great either. Now everyone is throwing their hands up and asking for solutions to an issue that is complex and where we have arrived at where we are because we have been looking the other way for too long. The OECD itself now says it is worried, when it is the one that imposed the educational drift of the last two decades, promoting an education only designed to acquire skills suitable for adapting to the labor market, while demanding, as has happened, that knowledge and learning disappear from curricula as unnecessary. In fact, the PISA study itself is made from this purely functionalist perspective of education, focused on competencies and not on knowledge. Notice that social sciences and humanities are not even a subject of evaluation and these subjects have been gradually displaced from educational programs.Unfortunately, the failure of the educational system is not only or primarily at fifteen years of age, but it is profound in all its stages until reaching university. It is systemic. Many factors converge there, but the keystone lies in the philosophy of education that has been imposed over the last two decades. Certainly, the profusion of screens has destroyed the attention span and work process of young people and not-so-young people who spend their lives in a virtual reality. Technological tools have replaced the effort and discipline inherent in learning. The emergence of AI has ended up dynamiting everything. The tools simulate that we are learning things, but in reality, we are settling into practical ignorance.
The main problem, however, lies in the pedagogical current that has become the systemic approach of constructivism. A poor association between the philosophy of knowledge and psychology has ended up turning classrooms into spheres focused on individuality, emotionality, and the self, rather than on knowledge itself. It has been said that acquiring knowledge is useless for the world that is coming, everything related to rote memorization has been banished, and the heritage of accumulated knowledge has been renounced in the name of a pragmatism that claims it is the child who must arrive at knowledge and especially develop skills through their own discovery. Teachers and professors have been asked to act as passive subjects, as facilitators in classrooms emptied of rigor and of the cultural heritage and knowledge that students deserve to acquire, not to be future docile and adaptable workers, but to be people with the capacity to develop a free and autonomous life while enjoying knowledge.Educational postmodernity has done a lot of harm. PISA reports are not needed. It can be explained if the thousands and thousands of primary, secondary, or university teachers are consulted. The predominance of ignorance in matters of general culture, the continuous lowering of standards of demand that the educational administration itself imposes, the imposter syndrome that makes professionals play along with a farce that leads us, that has already led us, to a mere culture of entertainment, with plenty of opinion but no criteria. The situation of reading and writing, which is everything in the progress of knowledge, reduced to nothing when books have been proscribed just like the obligation to read them in the entire educational dimension, replaced by useless screens that transport deplorable content. The long-term failure of the educational system is our failure as a democratic society. We already have clear evidence of this. There is no special need to improve in the rankings, but rather to restore a real educational system at the service of knowledge and society.In Catalonia, the shame is double. The falsification of the tests by eliminating 23% of the worst students is truly like cheating at solitaire. Probably, if they could be compared, they would be at the tail end of the autonomous communities. The evidence of the failure also of what has been called the inclusive school. Putting students of such diverse levels, special educational needs, and different languages and cultures with mid-year arrivals in the same classroom makes it impossible. An inclusive school is wanted without additional resources, with one teacher managing twenty situations and training menus at the same time. The lack of foresight and resources is placed on teachers who are left only with the option of sick leave for burnout, abandonment, or mobilizing. Addressing educational recovery is, probably, the most relevant political issue we have. Social and political debate, and agreements, are needed. But especially getting rid of the exalted pedagogical gurus who have brought us to this point.
