During my 36 years as a teacher (1977-2013) I have had to adapt to seven education laws, six of them from the democratic era. One even meant a significant change in the reasons and illusions that led me to choose this profession. So much change is nothing more than the chronicle of a failure, since none was achieving what was expected of improving education. Now one more education law has just been approved, the LOMCE, which will no longer affect me as an active teacher, but which, without having a crystal ball, I believe will fail again, at least in what it means to improve the education I want. Without saying that the whole law is bad, I think it is the worst of all. If it were applied long enough and the results it intends were achieved, not even that, in my opinion, would mean an improvement in educational quality.
I started this profession when education did not even extend to everyone and hearing that it was of poor quality. I have left when it has improved in quantity, now it is universal, but with total gratuity and quality yet to be achieved and with dark clouds on the horizon. I have heard the words school failure and early dropout as a problem of all this time, and I greatly fear that I will continue to hear them in the future, if the way to solve it is with this law.
But who is responsible for all this failure? Education is a stew with many ingredients and for it to turn out well, they all have to be of quality and in their right quantity.
The food we want is decided by law. And the impression I get is that what is of interest is more labor than human beings. More interchangeable automatons for the labor market, whom we make bow their heads with the bogeyman of the crisis, so that they serve as competitive pawns for the process of "chinification" that our society is suffering, than free human beings, who are taught to reflect, to put their creativity into action and to contribute their grain of sand for a less unequal, more just and happier world.
Being part of the stew that the law proposes to me, and being number one in the PISA report with this food, does not interest me.
I will write about the cooks, kitchen helpers and the rest of the ingredients another day.