Notice for castaways and other products derived from existential shipwreck: this article is based on real-life flotation devices. It begins on a moving island. Zulu time. September 2026. Interior day. Public transport in Barcelona (it could be any other space-time of the bitter Catalonia). The boy (9 years old) sits on the floor like a rock from the Upper Chalcolithic. The mother: "Oh, honey, stand up, the floor is dirty". Rock boy: "I don't want to!!!" (A unique phrase, like an expansive sonic destructive missile.) More mother: "Oh, honey, it's dirty, people can't pass, oh, your trousers, oh, oh, oh...." Operation dialogue and more dialogue. Final result of the journey: the kid didn't budge a micrometer. Nor will he for the next thousand years. 1st Century of the human rock.

Knowing how to read, reading to learn, and a love for reading. These are the three pillars on which, according to the Department of Education, the school reading plan (PLEC) must be based. Or, in other words, the plan that sets the didactic and organizational line that a school or institute must follow to ensure that students end up being good readers. At the moment, this organizational document is only a recommendation, and only about 700 of the little more than 2,500 public educational centers have a reading plan that meets the requirements set by the Generalitat. However, among the measures to reinforce learning announced by Minister Esther Niubó this week is, precisely, making the PLEC mandatory. This implies that, for the coming academic year, more than 1,800 public schools and institutes will have to create their reading plan from scratch or modify it to comply with this directive.

You don't have to be an expert to deduce that if our students are doing very poorly in calculation and reading, they would need to increase (and intensify) the hours of mathematics and language, from primary to secondary school. This is as evident as it is complicated to rectify in the short term. Precisely, the latest innovations have stolen the spotlight from these two basic areas of knowledge and have been sacrificed (or mixed) with other proposals that are perhaps more attractive to students, but which PISA results confirm are distancing us dizzyingly from the minimum requirements.

Half of preschool teachers in Spain do not read books to their students regularly. This is one of the conclusions of the latest TALIS Starting Strong report by the OECD, which analyzes the situation in schools regarding early childhood education. This year, for the first time, Spain participated. The study shows that only 55% of preschool teachers—that is, those with students between the ages of 3 and 6—read books to their students regularly. This percentage rises to 85% in the case of Ireland, which is by far the country with the highest rate of this type of classroom activity among the territories analyzed by the OECD. Turkey (69%), Sweden (68%), Chile (67%), and Japan (64%) complete the top of the ranking. Conversely, Morocco and Denmark (42%), Germany (46%), and Finland (48%) are at the bottom. Therefore, regarding the proportion of teachers who read books to their students, Spain is in the middle of the twenty or so countries on which the study focused. "There is a lot of international, but also national, evidence of the benefits of not only reading stories but also working on orality and discourse in early childhood, and even before the age of three," argues Pilar Prieto, ICREA researcher in the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). Hence, Prieto insists on the need for the link between orality and literacy to be systematically addressed in all schools across the country.

In such audiovisual and stressful times, reading has become a singular and almost revolutionary act. It goes against the grain. Reading time is precious, requiring willpower and determination. "Do you have time to read? Gosh! How do you do it?" people ask me. I reply: "Don't you have time to read? Gosh! How do you do it?"

"We need the curriculum to tell teachers how to detect if a student will have reading problems." This warning from school principal Francesc Martín, which may seem obvious, is one of the main obstacles to improving reading comprehension results in Catalonia. This is the conclusion of the study. Reading comprehension: the pending subject, presented this Monday by the Bofill Foundation.