“In teaching, it has become fashionable to adopt new and fanciful ideas, and many young teachers are carried away by the mistaken notion that unless a method is new, it cannot be the best. However, it is well to remember that change does not necessarily imply progress. Every method must be subjected, first, to the laws of common sense applied to the development of the child’s mind, and, second, to the test of actual classroom experience, before it can be considered the best method, or even a good method”. This paragraph is extracted from page 105 of a book published in New York in 1885 and titled The Eclectic Manual of Methods for the Assistance of Teachers. Any sensible person knows that the new and the good are different categories and that they can coincide or diverge. But in education, as the American pedagogue Robert Pondiscio recently said, “stability is easily confused with complacency or indifference. Therefore, schools reward the appearance of change over real improvement.” These words may seem exaggerated, but if I review my teaching experience since the early 70s, what I see is a kind of St. Vitus' dance of novelties that present themselves with a lot of promises under their arm, but which expire in four or five years. The usual thing is that the change has not been approved for being the technical answer to a problem, but because it allows us to show ourselves full of comforting vitality.And what if to improve Catalan schools the first thing we need is to cure our addiction to miracle solutions?According to Pondiscio, the reasons that explain the vulnerability of schools to phosphorescent ideas are four: The first is the weakness of our evaluation and feedback systems, which hinders an objective view of our results. There are so many variables at play in an educational center that it is very difficult to identify the specific responsibility of each one in the running of the center. The cause-and-effect relationship is never entirely clear, and where we discover correlations that align with our ideology, we tend to see causation.

Nick Gibb, the English politician who has reflected most on education, has written one of the most pedagogically stimulating books of this century so far. Reforming lessonsThe book, which bears the subtitle "Why English schools have improved since 2010 and how it was achieved," was published by Gibb. Gibb served as Shadow Education Minister in 2005 and as Education Minister from 2010 to 2012, from 2014 to September 2021, and again from October 2022 to November 2023.

Gregorio Luri (Azagra, Navarre, 1955) reads peacefully in the sun. The philosopher and educator, author of School is not an amusement park and The conservative imagination, received last Monday the Atlantis prize and is pleased with the publication of The dignity of mediocrity. A short philosophy of the unfinished. (Encounter, 2025). In both books and conversation, Luri uses quotations to weave together discourse and ideas. He does not do so—he assures us—or not only, for personal enjoyment, but because of the duty he believes we all have to transmit those things that help us understand the world a little better.

Suddenly, we hear a loud noise from our car's engine. Since we're not very good at car mechanics, we fear it's a serious breakdown and immediately take it to the mechanic. He lifts the hood, listens to the noise carefully, and immediately perceives it as a precise symptom of a malfunction. He tightens a couple of screws and solves the problem. All in two minutes. But these two minutes are the synthesis of many years of learning, of overcoming increasing difficulties that have allowed him to fine-tune his hearing. Where the layman only hears noises, the expert hears a language. Those who are ignorant of mathematics, for example, are completely unaware that nature is always speaking to them, precisely because it speaks in the language of mathematics.

"I was your student!" In the course of about five minutes, two people stop Marifé Arroyo on the street with gestures of gratitude and emotion. The teacher, expelled during the Transition from the school in Barx, a small town in La Safor, raises her hand and covers the faces of her former students, leaving only their eyes exposed, trying to remember what they looked like when they were children. "I don't recognize you this old and with a beard," she exclaims sarcastically.