The philosopher, pedagogue and teacher Gregorio Luri (Azagra, 1955) publishes his new book, Prohibido repetir (Rosamerón), in which he questions the pillars on which education has been based for the last three decades and which are collapsing in every PISA report we know: innovative methodologies, Finland, Lomloe, emotional education, multiple intelligences, etc.
The book is a defense of powerful knowledge, effort, exams and the transcendental importance of memory in learning, “there is no pedagogical alternative to elbows”, says the author.
The journalist Fran Echeve interviews him:
The title “Forbidden to Repeat”, but what is most interesting is the subtitle “a passionate proposal to save the school”. Is the school in danger?
If we accept that every year families devote more and more resources to their children's extracurricular education and that the lower the level of knowledge the higher the grades, we cannot say that it is at its best.
The ground on which today's education is based is clearly shaken. Everything that certain dogmas promised thirty years ago is not being fulfilled. The PISA data is getting worse with each report, which is evidence of what we see every day in the classroom.
I will limit myself to two statements made by PISA's factotum, Andreas Schleicher in the Financial Times on the same day that the latest report was made public. The first: “The lesson for me is that we have to achieve student well-being not at the expense of academic success, but through academic success”. The second: “When [PISA] first appeared, we thought Finland was the recipe for success, but twenty years later we don't know whether it has been part of the solution or part of the problem.”
In your new book you talk about the Mississippi miracle. There are also other countries that have made a 180-degree turn in education in recent years: England, Ireland, Finland....
It is important not to fall prey to our endogamous educational debates and to look beyond our borders to learn about good practices wherever they occur, but not to copy them mimetically (in education, those who copy do not learn), but to learn from them what is relevant. The case of Mississippi is spectacular because it has shown that no one is condemned to have poor school results.
The Finnish miracle is not so much?
The funny thing about the Finnish education system is that while they had serious doubts about its performance, we had blind confidence in it. In January 2023, the Finnish Ministry of Education officially admitted that things were not going well. Between 2003 and 2022, the average reading comprehension score had fallen by 56 points and the average mathematics score by 79 points, and the gap between rich and poor pupils had been widening. “Big and quite radical changes would have to be made,” said Anita Lehikoinen, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Education. While we were looking north, Soria was outperforming Finland. And there it remains, with splendid results whose cause no one seems interested in studying.
Education —the system— has promised our children that they will learn and pass the course without memorizing.
This is absurd. Memory is the residue that experience leaves behind. If there is no residue, there is no learning. I don't know anyone who wants to have less memory than they have. On the other hand, if what has been learned is not retained in memory, where can it be retained? All learning implies a modification, large or small, of the long-term memory. To know is to remember in time.
And parents have been promised that the emotional education of their children is more important for their future than their learning of subjects.
Psychic balance is undoubtedly very important; but when we need a plumber we do not ask him for a psychological report, what we want is for him to be efficient. The same when we need a mechanic, a dentist or a surgeon.
Two other pillars of LOGSE/LOMLOE are educational equity and learning by competencies. What are these two issues of the constructivist model that you question so much?
Costa Rica is one of the most equitable countries in the world precisely because three quarters of its students are crammed into the lowest achievement brackets, and there is not much difference between them. But who wants an equitable triviality? Wouldn't it be better to aspire to an equitable excellence? With regard to competencies, I think it is sufficiently clear today that knowledge and competencies are two sides of the same coin. Neither can one think seriously about absent information, nor can one be a cardiologist without knowledge. Constructivism works with children who come to school with building materials (a lot of prior knowledge), but not with poor (children) who come to school with precarious knowledge. What needs to be done is to accelerate their learning, and for this, direct, explicit and regulated teaching is essential. The two best instruments of ambitious equity are a good curriculum and a good coexistence.
With respect to equity there is a revealing fact: boys have a higher school failure rate than girls. Why?
The key question is: “Why do we refuse to study this fact?”
You have been repeating for years that school failure is a linguistic failure.
And I'll continue to brag about it. The best picture of learning is a Velcro strip. My language proficiency can be seen as the hooks on one side and new learning as the hooks on the other side. Without language (which is my culture in action) there is no possibility of hooking. The poorer my language the greater the cognitive load of new learning.
How to defend the importance of knowledge in an era in which even many teachers argue that everything is on the Internet?
Because the danger is, indeed, that everything is on the Internet... except the criteria for selecting what is relevant, which, if it is not in me, is nowhere. In the era of cognitive capitalism, which is ours, knowledge is the oil of the future. So much so that The Economist recently spoke of a “global battle for talent”.
If you want to continue reading the interview, you will find it here.