He Spanish school and education system is an obvious failure and I would rate total. There is no longer a way to keep hiding: the fault is neither of the parents, nor of the teachers, nor of the students, nor of society. Either the education system changes or we sink further.
Spain is the European country with the worst results in school failure and youth labor insertion. It was published yesterday by UNESCO in its report “Young people and skills”. There is nowhere to hide, we are the worst country to learn from Europe.
Young people, teachers, families and society are victims of a poorly designed education system, obsolete, variable, ideologized and absurd that is possibly responsible for Spain's inability to cope with the crisis and that has shameful results: high school failure rates and youth unemployment.
You give your child, a bright and curious little one to the system and you have many possibilities that, after the years, they will return it to you without a future and possibly without a title. Schooling in a bad system is not a choice, it is not a free decision. When they ask me how I risk not using the Spanish school system, I already answer this: don't you think it's a risk to use it?
I recovered my son from Spanish educational system at age eight, having made him believe that he was slow in school. 80% of the gifted fail at school. And now, with 12 years, goes a year in advance and even follows a course in Mythology at the University of Pennsylvania from a distance and in English. Slow was not, bad was the system committed to learning a deadly boring textbook by heart.
What I would change in the Spanish education system
I am sure what I would do to change the spanish education system: facilitate homeschooling, give more freedom to parents and cooperatives to create educational centers with alternative pedagogies, reinforce teachers by giving them more autonomy.
Bet on creativity and experiential and meaningful learning, eliminate memorization and exams, make the curriculum more flexible, radically reduce the ratios instead of increasing them and give a real boost to emotional education, personalization and attention to individual needs.
You have to leave the anachronistic education system, as Punset well described it and stop designing schools that kill creativity, as Ken Robinson says. And also stop crushing the curiosity of children, as Michio Kaku says.
The errors of the Spanish education system: Secondary, Primary and Infant
And is that the errors are not only of Secondary Education, which has them. I am tired of listening to teachers and parents who find themselves without a solution, children arrive without love for learning, with no more concern than learning from memorials, without the ability to create or think critically. And even as functional illiterates.
Helping them is complicated, possible but very complicated, especially since the system continues to demand learning without pleasure and without real understanding. A boy who does not want to learn, who hates studying, who does not understand what he studies or believes that it is worth anything is very difficult to recover.
If above is among that 10% of gifted people of which many are already school failure and have suffered harassment, the damage is enormous. If he is a boy who has suffered bullying, his heart is damaged. If you have real learning difficulties and have been tagged without giving real support by adapting the learning to your needs, you have to turn everything around and restore confidence. But many times it is late, especially since the system will continue to demand that it meet some parameters for which the child is not made, although his mind may shine.
But is that the mistakes have started long before: with the bad conciliation, with the almost universal nurseries, with the Infant School model and with a memorial Primary.
First, insisting on making babies independent. Second, in the Children's school, where it is very frequent that he is forced to paint without leaving the edges, to comply with absurd rules, to learn what they send you. The cards are the most important thing in the world, as if learning the yellow color by painting a card.
The chips, something optional, a form of play, can be. But nothing more. There is no need to buy chips at the Infant School. To force them to use an absurd child is to throw money and to hurt that little one.
Yesterday, a mother told me desperately that her girl left very bitterly from school, and of course, with the sad face sticker. He had stained the baby painting. The mother said that they paint freely, they stain the body, there are no margins, only color and freedom. But at school you can only paint inside the line and without staining or having fun. So tiny And already sad and suffering the pressure to grid it. And this has only just begun, I told him. There is only one way to do things: the one they send you. What effort to force creativity?
And in Primary. The Primary thing is that I do not conceive it. Seven year old children with two hours of homework. A total inability to properly attend to children who have special educational needs. Memorization, memorization, memorization. Exams every week. More homework More repetitions until the nausea of exercises. Books to read mandatory and often boring. Notes, ratings, tags. Sitting, not talking, little game, many rows, many rules.
Learn what they send you, don't reply, shut up. Above all, be quiet. And yes, a lot of money in textbooks, in material, in notebooks for each subject, in exercise books. In chickweed. No textbooks are needed, and if they are used, they are a guide, and nothing more. Taking an exam asking what the textbook says should be prohibited.
Of course, there are teachers and there are schools that are not quite as I say. And there are children who adapt. Of course. But the results are clear: a failure of the total education system. A suspense in education.
The keys to failure and the necessary change in the Spanish education system
First the family, the true center of the child's education, must regain its role. Not a role marked by a conservative vision necessarily, but a true awareness of its value as a space for coexistence and learning. But the reality is that our conciliation and our maternal casualties are one of the worst in Europe.
You have to dedicate real time to children. That is not worth the quality time or park children with little machines or consumer leisure. You have to be with the children, play with them, talk to them, take care of them and meet them. If we do not spend more time with the children, we are lost. They are lost. And if the parents and the labor system do not understand it, if we impose children to grow up in schools and only see their parents a couple of hours a day, there is no way out.
Y the key in school It is not tightening, it is not returning to the methods of the last century. The key is not to crush with more memorization and more exams. The key is not to put teachers on pallets, but to value their work. The key is not to make more differentiation by notes, but by interests and abilities. The key is to make the school a place where life is learned and directly experienced, not where you live to learn what others have decided you should learn.
The key is the true educational innovation, the one that puts the student at the center of the experience, the one that values the child, his evolutionary needs and his curiosity. And as long as we keep repeating the same method, we will fail. And the children and the future will pay for it.
Education is the best investment, but an Education with the model of Finland: modern, free, flexible and personalized, that prepares happy children, with their own criteria and confidence in their own talents. If we don't change that and start taking investment and flexibility, creativity and autonomy seriously, the Spanish school and education system will continue to be a total failure.
