I am a retired teacher in the current school year after 36 years of teaching. I would like to record some of my reflections on education based solely on my experience.
Today the debate on education is topical because the LOMCE (Organic Law for the Improvement of Educational Quality) is being processed and will begin to be applied next year. I am going to give some brushstrokes of how I think education can be improved, without spending more money and only making changes that I consider common sense.
To begin with, I will talk about education laws. For me, they have to meet two minimum conditions to be effective:
- They have to be technical and not ideological (and that can be done if desired). They cannot be weapons to be thrown against the other.
- They have to be consensual, at least with enough support to ensure their continuity through changes of government. Education is a state matter. This way it would be possible to work in the short and medium term and not with the insecurity created by the short duration.
The teaching staff is a key piece and has to be of excellent quality. No education system can be superior to the quality of its teaching staff. (This is stated in the PISA report but it is pure logic).
For this, two things are needed:
- Pedagogically competent management teams that motivate, encourage, that are at the forefront of innovation, in permanent updating, in work. In short, that their example drags the entire educational community. The management team cannot only have an administrative character. If it is necessary to return to the body of directors, it is returned, because it is possibly more effective than it is now. This will not be solved by directors appointed by finger.
- The teaching staff has to be made up of the good ones. There cannot be good, regular and bad ones. For this, the system of access and permanence in the profession must be changed. This can only be earned with continuous work well done and with permanent updating and innovation that must be mandatory and not voluntary, evaluable and with monitoring that it is applied. Their salary must be in relation to their merit, arbitrating a system that motivates them to improve and not that the salary increase is only a matter of passing trienniums.
The inspection must have a pedagogical character and not almost exclusively administrative as, in my opinion, happens now. If for this it is necessary to increase the provision of inspectors, it should be done because it would result in improvement.
There must be a climate of respect in the classrooms. Respect should not be confused with discipline, nor with imposition of authority. Respect is a climate that the teaching staff has to earn with their performance as a competent professional and the educational system when it is properly valued by students, parents and society as a whole.
The curriculum (syllabus) has to undergo a significant change. A great purge must be done eliminating the useless and filling it with useful, current and motivating content. The curriculum is the main source of motivation and its choice implies a philosophy of education.
A school for parents must be created so that they become aware of the importance of education, their participation is encouraged, they know the current changes in depth, and they are aware of the value of their role of reinforcement, not substitution, of the work of the school. Many parents do what they think is best with all their good will, but their efforts do not always go in the right direction.
I want to end with a reflection. What distinguishes us as human beings and makes us superior is intelligence. Fortunately, this does not understand sexes, skin colors or social classes. It is distributed randomly. An educational system that truly wants to take advantage of all the intelligence that that country enjoys, has to arbitrate the measures so that this is achieved. But not thinking that that intelligence works in a certain direction, but that it is capable of reflecting and after reflection acts, accepting what there is or believes, proposes, discovers, modifies, invents... In short, transforms this world, because no matter how little it does, we will surely come out winning.
*Diego Arrebola Gómez, retired teacher in the current course after 36 years of teaching.