If we want to ride a dead horse, we are doomed to failure no matter how hard we try to change the saddle, create groups of experts to advise us on how to improve its efficiency, organize courses for riders on family constellations or mindfulness, etc. The only sensible thing to do is change horses, especially if ours was killed by our low expectations. But more likely, our discussions will focus on how to provide the dead horse with more innovative shoes.
The fact that we should be discussing the percentage of students who achieve the outrageously basic competencies required only proves that we have very little interest in the actual level of our students' real competencies (understanding competency as mobilized knowledge). Educational administrators seem more interested in camouflaging mediocrity than in fostering high expectations, for fear of creating comparative grievances. They are imbued with a pedagogical ideology that makes them believe that what is beautiful and innovative is inevitably good, and that if one has good intentions, the facts should follow suit; if not, so much the worse for them.
Can we guarantee that the efficiency of our teachers, with the number of courses, reforms, and regulations they have to endure, is greater today than it was 25 years ago? Rather, it seems that trends and political correctness have much more weight in their training than scientific knowledge of their profession.
It doesn't matter that we have a growing number of studies showing us that explicit teaching is the most efficient and equitable. We decided long ago that the teacher we need to face the challenges of the future must be a companion to a student who autonomously constructs his or her own knowledge. In no way should the teacher be a transmitter, because everything there is to know is already on the internet.
Explicit instruction is simple: the teacher who must make a new concept understandable breaks it down into its constituent elements and offers students a step-by-step approach, from the familiar (prior knowledge) to the unknown (the new knowledge), weighing the appropriate cognitive load for each step. But the educational world is a romantic haven full of well-intentioned wizards seduced by popular myths about easy learning. In Catalonia, there are still schools that believe that learning to read and write is, like learning to speak, a natural learning process that children will acquire on their own sooner or later. This is, pure and simple, magical thinking.
Another example: the myth that every student learns differently and that, therefore, it's necessary to pay attention to their specific learning style is widespread in schools, but the basic cognitive patterns are very similar in all people. The similarities in learning styles are much greater than the differences.
We have elevated the hypothesis that motivation is the driving force of learning to the level of pedagogical dogma, ignoring the fact that there is no greater motivator than successful learning.
What seems professional today is the distrust of factual knowledge and the naive trust in general competencies (as if one could think about missing information), the sacralization of spontaneity and the denigration of memory (although knowing is remembering in time), the defense of critical thinking (ignoring the correct use of conjunctions) and, above all, of the conjunction. Exams are dismissed with the angelic argument that no student is a number, but we don't apply this reasoning to ourselves when, to check if we have a fever, we take a thermometer. Homework is perceived as forced labor (but culturally rich children never stop doing homework: it's enough for them to assimilate the familiar language).
These are all beliefs that Rob Henderson called "luxury beliefs," because the rich can afford them (the rich don't need summer exercise books because they'll be wandering around New York or Egypt), but they come at a very high price for the kid whose only adventure is the only adventure in Ocata. Constructivism, as it's often practiced, is incompatible with equity. I think of the 4th-grade students who practiced teamwork by facing the challenge of turning a sheet over without slipping out.
And we haven't talked about emotional incontinence or the progressive impoverishment of language (which is our culture in action).
