Year after year, we see that we are wrong, that the teaching methods do not work, but we persist in making the mistake, or even making it worse, instead of changing course.
Around the year of grace 1590, Galileo climbed to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa to throw spheres of different sizes to test whether the heavier ones reached the ground before the lighter ones. In fact, we lack solid evidence that he did so, and some historians, perhaps most, have questioned it. I read the anecdote in the first book written by Ernesto Sábato, who was a physicist before devoting himself to literature, but who was never a historian. He draws from it the lesson that interests us now: when scholasticism dominated European universities, Galileo had challenged it, not with a syllogism or a series of syllogisms, but with an experiment. Aristotelian mechanics guaranteed that the object with the greater mass fell more quickly. For centuries the authority of the sage of Stagira was incontestable, not because it had been empirically demonstrated that things happened this way, but because reason dictated that it should be so.
Galileo showed that Aristotelian logic had little to do with the acceleration of bodies in a vacuum. Today, pedagogy occupies the place that scholasticism had at the beginning of the modern era. He reigns over schools and universities, his officials are authorized spokesmen who have their own jargon (competencies, rubrics), which constantly returns to the BOE with frightening results: on one famous occasion, they replaced the venerable “blackboard” with a monstrous “panel of practical knowledge”, to the great delight of Lázaro Carreter, who dedicated one of his darts to him.
It didn’t help at all. They design the curriculum as experts in the subject. Now they have decided to eliminate the compulsory readings of the baccalaureate, to concentrate on the classics in favor of authors more attractive to young people. It is such a logical argument, so Aristotelian, that it is appropriate to transfer it to other subjects as well. After all, what is so attractive about integrals? Let’s eliminate them. Who says integrals says quadratic equations. I also don’t think that our high school students are very interested in the Catholic Monarchs or the Royal Statute of 1834. Let’s remove them from the curriculum. The best thing would be for them to learn History to reggaeton rhythms. Why are they forced to do gymnastics if what they like is football?
When I was 15, in the 2nd year of the old BUP, in the first class of History of literatureThe teacher put before our bored eyes a difficult poem by Vicente Aleixandre: “Tell me, tell me the secret of your virgin heart,/tell me the secret of your body underground,/I want to know why now you are a water, those “fresh shores where bare feet bathe in the foam.” We understood almost nothing, but we learned that words held secrets and that some poets had the best ones. We loved Enid Blyton and Captain Thunder, but fortunately, neither of them were on the school curriculum at the time. Those verses by Aleixandre have been with me for forty-five years and will continue to be so until death or Alzheimer’s take them away. That year, we discovered a world populated by extraordinary beings: from Garcilaso to Unamuno and from Galdós to Quevedo.
We don’t have a tower of Pisa to climb to reveal the pedagogical error, but we do have the Pisa report. Year after year, we see that we are wrong, that the pedagogical methods do not work, but we persist in making the error, or even making it worse, instead of changing course. We turn a blind eye to the spheres falling from the famous tower, we prefer to let ourselves be guided by the logic of the new scholasticism, impoverishing the classrooms. The old woman was very good at syllogisms, which were still studied when I went to school. So let’s end with a very pertinent one, but of which I will only write the premises. The conclusion is intended as a call to resistance.
All teachers are wise.
No pedagogue is a teacher.
