CONTROVERSIAS EDUCATIVAS.UNA CONVERSACIÓN CON OLGA R. SANMARTÍN

Abstract

Fashions, clichés and hackneyed concepts have taken over the school. It is said that there is no sense in learning things by heart because they are in Google. It is repeated that students must be protagonists of their learning process guided by the teacher. And it is emphasized that what is important are skills and not knowledge.
Against all this pedagogical approach, the Swedish expert Inger Enkvist shows her clear disagreement through a long and intense conversation with the journalist of the newspaper El Mundo, Olga Sanmartín. They both carry out an itinerary for the most controversial issues of the Spanish educational debate the comprehensive model against itineraries, equity versus quality, public system and private education, autonomous decentralization and state competences, secularism and freedom of choice for parents, technology and humanities, validated against the lack of demand, Vocational studies or University…
She criticizes that education in Spain is so ideologized and that theoretical truths are accepted without the slightest empirical contrast or scientific evidence. The book proposes avoiding emotional arguments and respecting the figure of teachers, enhancing their training and encouraging their performance.
She bluntly defends the teaching and use of language as the main training element: «without the development of language the student is not being educated».
It shows that the supposedly progressive models have failed in improving neither equity nor quality nor equality of pportunities and, in exchange, this has been achieved by countries not as democratic, as Singapore or others in East Asia, where the level of equality of all students has risen above.