I have decided to leave teaching after approximately 27 years of dedication to it. This decision stems from a deep reflection on my career as a student and teacher.
At university, as a physics student, the first year was very hard; I repeated subjects, and the effort of having to make up for them transformed me. I learned that failure can be the beginning of success, which contrasts with the current messages from those who direct education, in which failing seems like a definitive failure. I'll tell you a secret that doesn't reach society: within the structure of the education system (and this will rarely be acknowledged by anyone), the Education Inspectorate is in charge of putting pressure on school principals, and these are in charge of subtly putting pressure on teaching staff to ensure that all students achieve, at the very least, a "satisfactory achievement." This is good for Spain's school failure statistics, which the European Union considered unsustainable a couple of decades ago. The price for everyone to pass secondary school is that the development of talent, at best, is delayed.
When I took the Pedagogical Certificate after a degree in physics, I entered without prejudice into the new ideas about education. I didn't question then whether the term "educational sciences" was appropriate. Now I know that a science, to be called such, must formulate hypotheses that, through experimentation, can be validated or refuted. There is a great deal of complexity in experimenting with the development of people from age 3 through adolescence. I even consider what has been done, and in some schools, to be reckless and comparable to unconsenting drug testing.
In Scotland, a country where pedagogical innovation is beginning to regress, someone said that "something that worked was replaced by something that sounded good." It's hard to doubt the good intentions of those who believe that students are "dying to learn," "everyone has their own pace," "should be happy," "should collaborate rather than compete," and so on. But the reality is that even the very low-stakes tests that the system itself administers show that transversal skills like reading comprehension and math have been declining for years. This Sant Jordi, a friend bought three roses for four euros, and the girl who helped him used a calculator to tell him the total was 12 euros. Knowledge is online. Memory is old-fashioned.
The political administration, carried away by the signs of the times, by the speed of technology—which makes us believe that even the human essence is rapidly changing—has embraced an irresponsible incorporation of technology into the classroom. This is evident in contradictory changes: just 10 years ago, they told us that cell phones had to be introduced in class, and now they are timidly trying to remove them. One computer per student, with Wi-Fi, causes distraction and a lack of attention. This, coupled with the fact that everyone knows they will eventually pass, means that education bears no resemblance to what made us who we are. I don't think the 20th century was a failure of knowledge.
Fortunately, the results show that this thinking isn't just the opinion of someone nostalgic. When I teach some exams (pardon my word), or official tests, to friends outside my now former profession, they think what they're seeing is three or four years below what it is. If I thought that changing the way things are done was good for society, I would continue with the job. What I can't do is adapt to something that goes against my convictions, because it leads to a less educated, less critical society, and one that, under the anesthesia of happiness, will allow abuses of economic power to pass.
Every time there has been a setback to the great educational restructuring that has been proposed for decades by the social engineering organization that is the OECD, its territorial delegates (local politicians) have never addressed the root of the problem. It makes me think about the lack of acceptance of the Copernican system: the Earth can't possibly not be the center of the Universe. It can't be that denigrating content is a bad thing: what matters are the "competences." But there can't be competition without content.
For teachers who love and master our subjects, the psychopedagogical idea of atomizing knowledge into "competencies" is an atrocity. The proposed assessment is nothing but bureaucracy, the same one suffered by other sectors, such as agriculture. Politicians, so far removed from the day-to-day, propose paperwork to solve problems. Neither parents, nor students, nor teachers believe this is of any use. The system already relies on the limited capacity of teachers to protest. Unions are only concerned with the economic aspect. Dissent is limited to hallway conversations and social media.
The latest news in Catalonia is that, to reverse the poor results in science diagnostic tests for 4th year of compulsory secondary education, teachers will be given scientific pedagogy training. Who will do it? Psychopedagogists who completed social baccalaureate? The same ones who say that math is incomprehensible if it is not directly applicable? (Competential, they say.) They are the ones who say that a student is more predisposed to understand a statement if instead of saying "Calculate the area under the curve f(x)", you say "Jordi has inherited a piece of land from his grandfather Ramón that follows the function f(x)". These are students who are almost 18 years old, and they solve problems with statements structurally similar to "Juana has 3 candies and Pep gives her 4". By the way, in other autonomous communities children do not know the names of the protagonists of the problem and get better grades.
One more thing: the West is creating a society that is uncompetitive compared to other cultures like China, South Korea, or India, where effort is the foundation of education. There, students, at the expense of their immediate happiness, must strive to achieve a minimum standard. Our school, in comparison, tends toward leisure. Since the 2008 crisis, there has been a loss of the middle class, and not just economically. According to some private schools, pedagogical innovation is not addressed. Experiments should be done outside the home, lest something explode.
