Spain has an educational problem. It is not an impression, nor nostalgia for EGB (oh, if only it would return), nor a reactionary conspiracy. The PISA report presented today is a crash with no possible buffer because the pandemic excuse, this time, no longer works. The worst result in the historical series since 2000, period. A first and devastating conclusion: the educational system produces more deficiency than excellence. A second: no one will take responsibility.
Read more How Catalonia performs in the PISA 2025 report
Meanwhile, here we keep discussing whether learning should be competency-based, cross-curricular, inclusive, emotional, sustainable, or whatever other word fits perfectly in a hundred-page document and much worse in a teenager’s head. To put it briefly, rigor, discipline, and effort have gone out the window, and that’s where the problem lies.
Spain, albeit with various regional intensities, has achieved two feats to deserve such a lowly position.
The first. We said: the percentage of students with excellent results continues to fall while the percentage of students with poor results stagnates (thankfully it does not sink further), or in other words, those who do not understand what they read.
Rigor, discipline, and effort have gone out the window, and that’s where the problem lies
The second feat. Making the teacher have more and more duties and less authority, more forms and less time to teach. And then we are surprised that attention fades. As if the teenager were going to remain fascinated by an activity without consequences while the adult proposing it glances sideways at an educational platform to fill in another box.
Read more Blow in PISA: Spanish youth lose one school year in reading and almost another in mathematics
Also read
Then there is the cardinal sin: teaching knowledge. Added to the difficulty of doing so when the student believes that what the teacher gives in class can be explained by Google or a YouTube tutorial. Rivers, maps, concepts, mathematics. Old things, apparently. We have discovered that memorizing is suspicious, although no one can analyze, understand, or relate what has never been learned.
Perhaps the problem is that they wanted to put the whole world inside the school: ecology, feminism, pacifism, emotions, and other noble causes. All can be important. But time is finite. When you gain in breadth, someone pays the price in depth.
The cause of the debacle is multifactorial. They say that to camouflage the underlying problem. It is true that we must take into account the damn mobile phone which, by the way, was not brought into the classroom by the kids, precisely. The device has changed how they read and how they understand what they read. To no one’s surprise, they do it quickly, diagonally, and poorly. Technology has slipped out of our hands. There is also the poor fit of an inclusive school that lacks the necessary resources to fulfill the concept of “inclusion.” Also note changes in family structures, not just socioeconomic ones. And finally, increasingly diverse classrooms (a euphemism for more immigrants mid-course) that are increasingly difficult to manage for an overwhelmed and weary teacher.
There will be time to analyze the PISA debacle. But, without intending to break the Gordian knot that strangles the system, here are a few ideas. In case they are of any use. It would be about returning: to paper and handwritten notebooks (resorting to technology only if it provides proven value); to subjects and exams; to repeating a year because giving passing grades freely is cheating the student; to census external evaluations at the end of each cycle; to maximum ratios of 20 students; to mentoring by veteran teachers with young ones; to educational inspections; to pedagogy without ideology (not the floropondio pedagogy, as Gregorio Luri calls it)…
Read more The school year starts with strike, AI rules, and the PISA controversy
More resources, yes. And much more common sense.
