One of the things that has struck me most in recent years regarding the supposed ‘education crisis’ is the way in which educators and those responsible for educational policies flagrantly ignored the more than evident décalage between the methods and the curriculum of our schools with respect to the needs of the production system typical of “late-capitalist” or “informational” societies. We have not tired (well, a little bit we have) of referring to authors such as Julia Varela and Fernando Álvarez-Uría (to cite only two Spanish authors) to remember the instrumental character that the implementation of compulsory universal education had for the capitalist production system from its beginnings in the transition from the 19th to the 20th centuries, and to point out that the habits, skills and knowledge that the capitalist system demanded at the beginning of the 20th century are considerably different from those it demands at the beginning of the 21st.
Today I found this extensive report from Time magazine, eloquently titled
How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century
. Although a bit “old” (it’s from December 10 of last year) I found it relevant that a mass media outlet and certainly mainstream like Times magazine dedicated such an extensive space to education.
It seems that in the United States “authorized” voices are beginning to be heard that question the way in which an education crisis is being managed, the starting gun of which was the report
A Nation at Risk
, prepared at the beginning of the Reagan era and which proposed a “return to the origins” (Back to Basics), a reinforcement in the curricula of the basic subjects of reading, writing and mathematics and a strong policy of control of ‘quality’ in education, which involves establishing rigid standards regarding the curriculum. Some of those precepts have long been applied in the United Kingdom under Blair’s mandate and also had their reflection in the controversial Organic Law of Quality Education of the PP. But better to talk more extensively about this on another occasion.
Technorati Tags: e-learning, education, school, social, web2.0
The Time magazine article reviews the common places of an education for the information society in what has already been called, unfortunately, ‘school 2.0’: prioritizing the learning of cognitive skills over the acquisition of knowledge, working in teams, learning to learn, enhancing emotional intelligence, learning to manage information, etc., etc. It can be clearly seen how the article relates each of these points to the characteristic work environments of the new economy in which they will be useful for students, referring in some cases to the testimony of senior officials of important companies.
Leaving aside that the article obviates any type of social, citizen or community implication or relationship of the school, which could be more or less accessory, the internal contradiction of the discourse that the article proposes and promotes resides in the fact that not all workers in the information society access jobs in which it is necessary to put into operation the “skills of the google era”.
Perhaps, the first step to undo this paradox is necessary to understand with greater depth and accuracy what is the function of education in the current system of production of globalized capitalism and to understand in what way the school reproduces certain forms of social and cultural domination, from there…