Teachers are on strike with the astonishing support of the politicians who have been governing Catalan education in recent years. Esther Niubó asserted that this strike "requires the full support of the Catalan government." Teachers' discontent is real, and it's good that it's being acknowledged. But is it understood that the problem cannot be solved by propping up the system with band-aids while simultaneously asking schools to resolve all the issues that social change is bringing to the forefront? These issues affect the relationship between families and schools, the meaning and purpose of knowledge, the status of authority, and ultimately, the role of schools in society.
Teachers know what the inspectors are asking for (despite the many bosses and positions of authority), but many don't quite grasp the pedagogical reasons behind the demands. They sense that the prevailing pedagogy has been hijacked by a cult of superstition promoted by ideologues who know there are students because they've read about it. More than one will say I'm exaggerating. I hope so! But the dominant pedagogical discourses often come across as a kind of religion for fools.
Educational measures are taken based on ideological instinct, ignoring scientific data and teaching experience. I'm thinking of explicit instruction. Decades of research in cognitive science have given us a solid understanding of the importance of managing the cognitive load of learning, sequencing content from simple to complex, providing examples before moving on to practice, developing habits before demanding their application, scheduling recall activities, and so on. These are widely reproduced findings, but educational administrators prefer to "reimagine" the school with methodologies that, like discovery learning, privilege the privileged. The capacity for autonomous inquiry is not part of our standard equipment. It is acquired through the systematic and explicit acquisition of knowledge and skills. Demanding independence in ignorance is to condemn the student to narcissistic ignorance. Problem-solving is obviously very important, but the cognitive demands it entails negatively interfere with the learning process of beginners. Discovery learning, like constructivism, is a luxury belief that favors those who start with cultural advantages. Despite the evidence, we insist that knowledge must be constructed, as if it possessed some property that prevented it from being transmitted. We can say something similar about critical thinking, because one cannot think about absent information (without good information, valuable arguments cannot be constructed), or about the notion that separates skills from content, because it confuses the learning of a novice with the behavior of an expert.
Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are the most harmed by a school climate of indiscipline. A noisy classroom is not a learning environment. Poor students should receive the same discipline for free that wealthy students buy at private schools. If we listened to parents, we would see that they consistently support stricter discipline than that practiced by many reformers. We insist that "we are educating for jobs that don't exist," but if you visit a leading technology company, you will discover that the essential skill is self-discipline, which begins with the responsibility of putting everything back in its place.
And what about those who claim that in the age of Google and AI, knowledge is no longer necessary?
And what about the overvaluation of group schoolwork, which fosters atomization, rewards cutting and pasting, and leaves no residue from the experience other than that of a pastime for most and resentment for introverts?
And what about the relegation of memory, when it's clear that learning is remembering in time, that without modification of long-term memory there has been no learning? Memory is nothing more than the residue left behind by an experience as it passes.
And what about the absurd thesis that each student learns differently, when the ways of learning are more similar than different, and thanks to this similarity we are mutually understandable beings?
Let's imagine there are 100,000 teachers in Catalonia. I can accept that to 10,000 of them, all this might sound like reactionary rhetoric. But I believe it's shared, from the top of the bell curve, by the 50,001st teacher. And there's no possibility of improving education without their active participation, because the images that the 50,001st teacher projects about their work are always true in their consequences.
