Let it be said that the hyperbolic title of this post is due more to our fondness for unsophisticated wordplay than to a thoughtful and transcendent reflection. But let’s go bit by bit: the resounding – as well as poetic – expression comes to the case of the pedagogical manifesto published by the
Network for Research and School Renovation
(IRES) under the title
It is not true
.
At a time when the debate on education in
And even more: […] the dominant school culture in Spain continues to be based on the direct transmission of unconnected content and, not infrequently, outdated and irrelevant, on mechanical and repetitive learning, on selective and sanctioning evaluation and on the extension of the school day of minors with abundant homework and tasks.
We say that the document has special value because we are very accustomed to many of our positions, shared on the other hand with many people, being disqualified because we “do not live the day to day of a classroom” or we speak “from theory”. Well, here is a group of teachers who believe that a renewal of the school culture is necessary in a direction opposite to the “back to basics” and who, as they themselves say, try to develop in their centers work dynamics alternative to the hegemonic ones. And they know very well what they are talking about: From experience we know that the most likely thing, if we do not organize ourselves, is that we adapt, reproducing the practices that, sedimented by inertia, are habitual in the centers.
For those who are not familiar with the daily life and work in an educational center, this may be shocking or exaggerated, but it is not. The testimony of a high school teacher who explains the following in the comments to the manifesto comes to the case: I completely agree with what is stated in the manifesto, moreover, these are ideas that some members of the Cloister of the Institute where I work have been defending for some time and this defense has caused some colleagues to even withdraw their greetings. That’s how things are!
By the way, if you have morbid inclinations you will not find waste in the comments to the manifesto; a good part are an authentic delirium, a bit in the style of “debate to the death” that characterizes portals such as e-barcelona.org and so on, where many times the arguments shine for their absence or for their bizarre eccentricity – such as that of the professor who, after reading the text, dedicates himself to disqualifying it by appealing to his spelling mistakes (sic) -. We insist that these are only a part, considerable yes, of the comments, and that there are also those who opine with lucidity; however, the litany of common places and paralogisms also offers us a fairly faithful portrait of the reality of education in our country.
The debate established in the comments following the publication of the manifesto perfectly stages the bloody as well as hidden war that is (re)produced daily in our schools and institutes: the one sustained by ‘teachers’ and ‘pedagogues’, that is, the war between those who defend an education based on the transmission of content and those who defend an education based on the student (to put it in a very synthetic way). The truth is that both positions repeatedly incur in what seems to us an error: in the first place, there is talk of ‘the’ pedagogy, (mis)understanding that ‘pedagogy’ is exclusively the set of pedagogical guidelines marked by the official educational plans, when we should talk about ‘the’ pedagogies; secondly, the fact that traditional education, based on the oral transmission of content, also implies a specific type of methodology in teaching, ‘a’ pedagogy, is omitted.
But the most important gap in this contest, and in the manifesto itself, is the omission of the way in which social, historical circumstances condition pedagogical practices and the general orientation of the educational project. To say this again is quite repetitive and makes us seem heavy, however in the discussion that concerns us it is not taken into account at any time. Except for one exception, someone who signs Dr. Antonio Sánchez says: The “Manifesto” repeatedly incurs in what we could call the “pedagogical fallacy”. That is, it pretends to solve problems that in no way have their origin or anything to do with didactic methods, but with political and social situations, […] Teaching does not fail in its objectives; on the contrary, it faithfully fulfills the task for which our admired demagogues designed it and educates unpunished fools, irresponsible cretins, to perfection.
It would be necessary to overlook the high doses of atrabilis and reaction that the opinion of this gentleman distills to be completely in agreement with him, but in the background he comes to expose what we already commented on this blog about the article by Nora Catelli
The failure of ESO is a triumph
, and that could be complemented, in a more extensive and reflective way in this other article by Nico Hirtt, which we also commented on here. However, we think that it is a gross error to think that pedagogy has nothing to do with all this, precisely pedagogies are never neutral tools, but technologies (of subjectivity) that respond to concrete (bio)political agendas, that is, among other things, to the needs of a certain regime of material production and meaning.
