The problem is the competencies

Once again, recent education headlines have raised the serious problem of student proficiency in Catalonia. Specifically, the math level in sixth grade is the lowest in history, and the difficulties in English in fourth year of compulsory secondary education, although Catalan seems to be on the rise. The Generalitat (Catalan government) also makes headlines by announcing the implementation of additional measures to improve students' science proficiency. Among other measures, it aims to expand teacher training in science teaching to improve the quality of teaching. But what is the cause of the problem of students' low proficiency? It is surely multifactorial. Investing in additional measures means that what has been done so far is not enough. That these measures include teaching methods to help teachers improve their proficiency also presupposes that they are not doing well. This is debatable, because these same teachers have been validated by the same administration that now proposes teaching them more method. However, no one proposes a different perspective that would allow us to turn things around. If the problem is knowledge, why reinforce teaching methods? Here I go. The key to all this is the lack of reflection on content due to an over-emphasis on skills. The logic of skills, this idea of what content is for, this obsession with know-how, ends up being detrimental to knowledge—not all knowledge, but the most important things for being able to navigate in a world where intelligence has been hijacked by machines. What's the point of knowing how to perform an internet search without knowing if what we've found is correct because we lack the knowledge? The difficulty today is figuring out what fundamental knowledge must be acquired to navigate socially without being fooled. The children really enjoyed one activity, but what did they learn? It's not about raising competent children, capable of applying knowledge, but rather educated, cultured children, curious to know things—not precisely the things that circulate on the networks, but those that have shaped culture. Instead of teaching how to use AI from the outset, we should be taught the background of AI, how it was invented, who invented it, how it was invented, and, above all, why. Instead of teaching English by playing a video game, we should teach the English that Virginia Woolf wrote. Precisely because it has no application, none at all, other than to make English say things we wouldn't have imagined in other languages.

Aristotle once said that, in addition to knowing things, it's important to know how to discern when to use what we know and when to abstain. That's what education is all about. The Catalan Escola Nova was aware of this, which is why they focused on teaching core content. Without content, we can already reinforce methods to use nothing. If we continue to think in terms of competencies, we won't get out of this dead end.