Reform after educational reform we find very similar results: unmotivated students, lack of creativity, inability to prepare students for the challenges of the future, problems of self-esteem and high levels of school failure. The Spanish education system is sad. But is school, as we know it, the only and best possible model?
The first thing we should consider is what the objective of education really is and if the failures may have at its origin that the model we are using is outdated, outdated. Many voices are raised in that sense but there seems to be no capacity or willingness to listen to them.
Learning is natural in humans
Human beings have always learnedIt is a natural thing in us: curiosity, overcoming, problem solving and knowledge transmission are the most outstanding characteristics of our species. But have we always used the same type of school?
The answer is no. Throughout history the learning of children and young people has been carried out in very different ways, appropriate to the needs of that society and, also, it would be absurd to deny it, proposals for that society to be perpetuated. But in addition to all that, teaching models have been an incentive that led new generations to overcome the above and innovate. Does our school really respond to the needs of our society?
A review of learning models in the History of Human Being
In prehistory human beings lived in small groups with kinship relationships and children were enculturated by the group, learning directly from other individuals: their parents, other older children and other adults in the group. In some cases there would be adults who controlled certain techniques or knew stories better than others and would be the ones to transmit them. There was no fixed person chosen as a teacher and there was no specific place to learn. The teaching was structured around two purely human skills: conversation and manual skills. Life was what the teachings provided and were closely linked to it.
With the Neolithic There was a greater distribution of work. The cities arrived, the priests specialized in knowledge and above all, the writing arrived. Not all people learned to write and this surely if it was done in something that might resemble our schools, where a teacher taught an elite technique or knowledge.
In the Classic Greece We know another teaching model, that of the philosophers, which surely is not exclusive to the classical Hellenic world, but which we can point out as paradigmatic. The children of the upper classes would learn at home and when they approached adulthood or already in it, they chose and were chosen by a teacher, a sage, who transmitted their knowledge to them personally. In Rome, we do know schools similar to ours, in the sense that if children (and sometimes girls) were sent with a teacher to learn the necessary knowledge for the exercise of citizenship, but they were equally free choice and They were not regulated by the authorities.
In the Middle Ages the monasteries, the guilds and the patrons were those who, in very different ways, provided education, although this was always somewhat restricted to small groups. The others continued to learn from their parents and other nearby adults, but only what was limited to the rudiments of religion and the work that was done. Social mobility was very small.
The arrival of print It was a revolution that allowed the written word to be much more accessible, but still limited. The Renaissance was a change of direction in the sense of knowledge, which recovered research and formulated the basis of scientific knowledge.
The majority of people who acquired a high culture did not follow a closed program, unique and validated by the States, but seeking their interests and the teachers who best adapted to them. Even in the Universities, until about a century ago, no entrance exams or previous validated studies were entered, nor was a closed agenda fulfilled. It is true that they were something forbidden for the majority of the population, but in the end, it would be necessary to consider whether to make them part of a "cursus honorum" makes a lot of sense, when they should allow greater flexibility.
With the Enlightenment and the bourgeois revolutions awareness was made of how important it was for the people to have elements of their own judgment and that should be achieved with the extension of instruction and culture. And the school was presented as a way to achieve this progressive ideal. A fact of undeniable value. But the Industrial Revolution and that ideal was subsumed in another type of interests: to train workers that could adapt to what was expected of them in the factories.
It was Federico Guillermo de Prusia who imposed an educational model that we still maintain based on the homogeneity of knowledge, the iron control of the State over contents, qualifications and teaching permits, and sought, above all, the formation of obedient subjects who were willing to follow a fixed pattern of behavior. The Prussian school model was extended and, despite the criticisms of movements such as utopian socialism, it is what, in the end, all countries were assuming, without being aware, even in the most progressive moments, that a curriculum existed concealed designed with an object that was not freedom, but uniformity and obedience.
As Industrialization said it was what made the extension of basic training historically necessary, as future workers had to be prepared to meet standards, strenuous work schedules and the schools themselves would end up looking like factories. A fixed schedule indicated by sirens, separation of knowledge or work, homogenization of students and content. And it came to appear that there was no other possible way to design a school than that. And there we continue, educating children of the 21st century with the same model as in the 19th.
Today's society and its needs
But our society is completely different. It changes very quickly and scientific, technological and cultural advances do it too. It is essential that the school adapt to the enormous changes and assume that information technology is today a vehicle to include as a priority.
All these new communication habits should be part of the knowledge and the way in which knowledge is transmitted. And, at the same time, I should not forget those biological and evolutionary bases that human learning has always had: word and direct action, experimentation, life. Nature, touching things, doing them because you want to learn how to do them, the earth, the sky, the plants, the rivers ... all that remains basic to build meaningful learning in children.
But our schools are not like that. They are closed buildings, with bars, with classrooms and desks, with textbooks and written exams. The new technologies appear but always as support for what is really "serious" and if we talk about touching, feeling, getting emotional and being in contact with the natural and human environment, it still happens less.
Cement patios. Chairs and tables where the child should remain sitting listening and without interrupting. Closed curriculum, isolation from vital reality, authoritarian structures and external evaluation. All this contributes to the school ceasing to be truly connected to the needs of children as small human beings in formation and the reality of a complex and changing world.
I have not finished, in future topics I will talk about the successive empty and useless educational reforms and the questions of organization of contents and spaces that make the school fail and continue to fail. And that it will fail much more if it does not perform a deep transformation. The school we have in Spain is not the only possible or the best.
