In the interview Ot Bou Costa conducted with Gregorio Luri for the digital newspaper Vilaweb, the pedagogue and philosopher shares his reflections, which are always interesting. Here is an excerpt.

—How predictable were the results of the PISA report?

—In 2010, the director of the Catalan Evaluation Agency, Ximo Prats, already told me: "We are not doing as well as we thought". Then the results were good, at the top.

—Are we not teaching enough vocabulary? 

—An American study counted the words children hear every hour according to socioeconomic level. I tried to replicate it here. I spent many hours counting words in different settings. They are not strictly scientific data, but they are indicative and coincide a lot with those of this study. There are kids who hear about eight hundred words per hour. Some hear about 1,600. At the end of the year, it can happen that, between two four-year-olds at the extreme levels, one has heard forty million more words than the other. They are in different worlds.

—And this comes from the training they [teachers] receive?

—Obviously. Today, in Catalonia, it is easier for a teacher to leave the faculty knowing all the speeches in favor of the end of school than with a firm knowledge of what dyslexia means. Being a teacher is a job. You can have all the good will, but you must know how to write. And write with a style. And there must be meaningful information in your writing. Otherwise, no matter how well-intentioned you are, they will say goodbye to you. You must know the craft, and the craft of teaching is very complicated.

—The problem of resources has been dragging on for a long time.

—Yes, we have not discovered anything. It must also be said that having more resources does not mean better results. The Basque Country uses much more resources than Catalonia and the results have also gone down.

You can read the whole interview here.