The school that teaches

Recently I was asked how I imagined the school I would have liked to attend. The question is relevant as a pedagogical diversion, and with that spirit I offer my answer.It would be, in the first place, a school that teaches (sets milestones and educates attention).I would give students as much quality time as possible. A vulnerable student needs the school to compensate for the cognitive gaps they bring from home. Who, if not, will do it? Wasting time is depriving them of opportunities.I would work thoroughly on the link between reading comprehension and prior knowledge. Whoever knows more, understands better and accumulates more background, expanding their prior knowledge. Teaching content is also teaching how to read.I would take care of disciplinary literacy. Given that every subject has its own lexicon, every teacher is a language teacher. There is no school activity that cannot enrich the students' language.It would have a content-rich curriculum: cumulative, sequential and coherent. Based on knowledge, driven by knowledge and articulated in didactic units, in accordance with the principle "from simplicity to complexity".Each activity would evaluate the affordable cognitive load, because it is necessary to give students what AI eliminates: effort.I would value knowledge, because we only strive to achieve what we consider valuable. Without knowledge there is no higher-order thinking. Knowledge is what we think with.I would not rely much on the existence of generic competencies. Neurologists, for example, are not particularly good at diagnosing cardiology cases.Since we would take equity seriously, we would bet on a sequential curriculum, with controlled progression and explicit instruction (the most effective one).There should be one curriculum for the entire school, not as many curricula as there are students with learning difficulties. A well-sequenced curriculum leaves no one behind.I would argue that knowledge does not have any property that prevents it from being transmitted and I would not confuse epistemology and pedagogy.Its basic principle: no student can do what they have not learned. Therefore, one would teach to remember. Without a trace in long-term memory, there is no learning. We would not underestimate memory and would see forgetting as a pedagogical challenge (as the Ebbinghaus curve reminds us).

The first thing we would do with a child with learning difficulties is to ask ourselves about the possible pedagogical causes. Our school would be seen as a republican institution committed to the promotion of the common culture.The key pedagogical relationship would be face-to-face. It has no substitute, although it has always required complements (from clay tablets to digital ones).The student's error would be seen as a learning opportunity, based on the premise that the student usually provides the correct answer to the question they are asking themselves. Therefore, it is necessary to make the logic of their error explicit to them.We would dedicate all available resources to the moments where divergent trajectories manifest in students (such as the transition at 9 or 10 years old, when one moves from learning to read to reading to learn).The school would be inclusive, but not every classroom would necessarily be so permanently. Neurodivergent children, for example, need continuous and tailored attention.We would practice the magic words that facilitate coexistence: thank you, please, sorry, I trust…In our classrooms there should be no place for math anxiety. There is no humanism without mathematics.We would like everything that allows leaving social differences at the door of the center. Others' excellence would be celebrated and its emulation would be encouraged.We would value rigorous thinking much more than critical thinking, and reasoning much more than opinion.We would treat emotional education with caution, lest it be the very malady for which it believes itself to be the cure.We would ask families for three things: to ensure their children's sleep hygiene, to allow them to enjoy free and risky play, and ten minutes of daily reading (around 730,000 words a year).The summary of it all is the conviction that writing is making one's own thought visible. Once visualized, it can be questioned, refined, or strengthened. Writing well is practicing rigorous thinking, because, far from being reduced to a means of transmitting ideas, writing is the best way to gain clear and distinct ideas. Clarity is empathy. As my admired Nick Gibb says, literacy is not a part of education, it is what makes education possible, because it clarifies goals and strengthens attention.