What needs to be known

BarcelonaIf a company, a scientist, a chef, a doctor, or an architect were to fail continuously, would they change the way they work? Probably yes, right? Well, that is what we must urgently do with schools.

It is about analyzing what is not working and making changes. But making them with a commitment to permanence. Catalonia does not need another reform, inspired by a pendulum-like will, but rather to pause -analyze everything we already know, because our educational system is over-diagnosed-, copy well from international success cases, and invest resources in it. If possible, the transformation process should be done unitedly, quickly, and without added spectacle, because educational failure is so resounding and has lasted for so many years that very few people can claim medals.

The main question today is this: what exactly do we want a person to know when they leave school?

It seems easy, but it is not. We have become accustomed to explaining what they should know how to do: think critically, work in a team, solve problems, communicate, be creative. All very necessary. The problem appears when we ask: think critically about what?

To understand Trump, you need to know something about the history of the United States and economics. To understand Putin, you need to know the Soviet Union, Russia, and Europe. To understand a drought, you need to know something about meteorology and climate. To detect disinformation, you need to have information. To say something, you must have something to say. To perform complex operations, it is better to know how to multiply.

We will also have to accept that memory is one of the tools of intelligence and not a form of oppression.

The debate about the PISA results, which have highlighted the worst results ever seen in Spain and a framework of generalized decline in OECD countries, is not strictly pedagogical. Because school does not only distribute knowledge. It also distributes opportunities.

Not demanding that students give their best and lowering the standard does not benefit anyone. Rigor is not a conservative idea. There are few things more unequal than a school that demands little, because at home and in extracurricular activities, students with higher purchasing power will break the tie.

Not to mention families who abandon public school in favor of charter or private schools, causing students with greater social complexity to be concentrated in public schools.

The school also needs more and better teachers. Enough to attend to diversity and focused on the transfer of knowledge rather than on “accompanying learning”. Children can deduce and think, but they will not spontaneously discover photosynthesis. Someone who knows more things than the students teaches and guides them. At the same time, it is necessary to recover the prestige and respect for the teaching staff, as well as their autonomy and the ability of principals to choose teachers. These competencies that guarantee the autonomy of schools are not at odds with having results of the work done and ensuring that the quality of the teaching staff begins with the requirement for their access to the university and the system.

If there is a cursed word, this is authority. We have been afraid of the word because we remembered too much the concept of authoritarianism. It is understandable, in a country where physical punishment in school is not that far away. But between a barracks school and a classroom where the teacher spends half an hour trying to get silence or a minute of concentration, there is quite a lot of territory.

I do not believe that education can be reduced to exams and curricula. A school educates people, it does not just produce results. But sometimes we use this truth to avoid another: it must also produce learning. For years, the data has been warning us. Each new test confirms something we already knew and each time we react to it with a mixture of institutional surprise and fatalism. When something does not work, we change the curriculum. Then we change the evaluation. Then we explain that the important thing is not so much the result as the process. And finally PISA arrives and reminds us, with the usual delicacy of numbers, that processes should also lead somewhere. We can choose five priorities: reading, mathematics, knowledge, good teachers, and evaluation. They can be others, those considered by the best actors in the educational community, but we must stay the course. Not for two academic years. Nor until the next minister. For ten years.