-In Argentina, of those enrolled in first grade, only 16% finish high school on time, with basic knowledge of language and mathematics. In addition, 40% of high school graduates are below the poverty line. As a psychologist and education specialist, what would you do with a country like this?
-It must be appreciated that it is a great achievement that there is an educational system to which everyone has access.
It is a platform on which you can build.
In another era, most of the boys did not access school.
The second thing is to understand that Education is a system with processes that require a coherent alignment.
There is no point in changing the curriculum if opportunities are not simultaneously created for teachers to develop their skills.
Or improve the operation of a school if it has "taxi teachers", who complete their salary by working in five different establishments.
It becomes very difficult for them to "make life" at school.
Building a good educational system requires consistency in actions.
How could that be achieved here?
-There must be a shared vision of what is intended to be done and what is up to each one.
This implies that levels of government and civil society generate an educational culture.
There must be shared values.
Values that are as invisible and important as water.
I have the feeling that there are educational systems designed for failure.
They are extremely fragile and the logical product is that the children go to school but do not learn.
It is not an accident but the result of a system designed to fail, without consistency.
-You usually talk about empowering boys to improve their opportunities. How is this achieved with half a country in terrible socioeconomic conditions?
-Is this possible to do.
I give you an example.
In 2018, the OECD surveyed teachers from 60 countries.
They asked how they taught.
Almost all of them seemed to be good at teaching, but they showed great heterogeneity when it came to thinking of pedagogical strategies to increase the responsibilities of the students.
Get them to work with others, to face cognitive problems that challenge them, that they have to work on for more than a week.
I was thinking about this while watching the Argentine film
El suplente
.
It brings to light the enormous structural challenges of many children in environments of poverty and drugs.
But it also shows how teachers don't challenge kids.
There is no good task of commitment and involvement.
Fernando Reimers, psychologist and professor of Education at Harvard University, at a United Nations Congress, together with his wife.
-A couple of “tips” to at least try it?
-I believe that it is possible to challenge students of any condition and get them to develop a set of abilities.
First of all, there should be a logical assignment of teachers in each school.
The teacher is there all day.
One part of the time in front of the group and the other, working with their colleagues.
Second, collegiate teams to create strategic plans by school, so that specific challenges and ways to address them can be defined.
Today, in Argentina, for some kids it is easier than for others to prepare to go to university.
In the environment (
N. de la R.: from a popular neighborhood in Buenos Aires
) that the film shows, only professors go to university.
Each school has to make its place a pedagogical project, with autonomy and continuity.
It requires building coherent systems, being clear about what you are trying to do, and having institutional support.
-Speaking of The Substitute, the film touches on the controversial issue of approving low-performing students. The province of Buenos Aires recently promoted the elimination of repetition to mitigate school dropout. What do you think?
-It has been known for a long time that one of the main reasons for dropping out of school is continuous repetition.
It is well studied.
Children do not decide one day “
I am not going back to school anymore
”.
They or their parents make that decision as a result of having repeated several years.
Repetition is a very inappropriate way to support a child who has not learned what he should.
That is, “
well, you didn't learn what was expected;
then we are going to give him a second dose of the same medicine
”.
It's a clumsy mechanism, like doing brain surgery with a saw.
On the other hand, making the problem invisible and having no one repeat it without doing something else is just as clumsy.
It's like saying "
I prefer not to know if they learned or not, and let them go on."
”.
Personalized medicine is needed: interventions that make it possible to understand why some children find it more difficult, without the need to fail them.
-How should the pedagogical approach be in these cases?
-The first condition to learn is to have time devoted to effective study.
Due to their living conditions, some boys do not attend school regularly, and these are not always designed so that these students can follow the subjects.
This is easy to solve with inverted classes (
N. de la R.: model in which new knowledge is acquired outside the classroom, perhaps online, and what has been learned is practiced in class with activities
), so that the content transmission can be done with technological tools.
This can be done by any teacher offering some recorded classes.
And tutoring could be added: an assistant, a retired teacher or an advanced student.
Repetition is a clear expression that there is a problem.
-A recurring theme is the questioning of teacher training, which is not university, is usually deficient and has fewer and fewer applicants, given the low salaries and the associated social discredit. What do you suggest?
-For the system to have quality, teachers must be well trained and have continuous training.
You have to think about how to build that educational
continuum
that begins with initial training and must continue with a support system in which teachers are trained until the last day.
Unfortunately, in some places, the educational system serves interests outside of children.
Above all, to political parties or other corporations to reward groups that support them politically.
And since the education system represents an important budget, it also has corruption.
Imagine the possibilities of running school canteens!
How do you overcome those pitfalls?
-We must establish an educational culture.
In more advanced societies such as Finland, Singapore or Portugal, it is understood that educating is giving opportunities.
There must be incentives for the teaching career;
find people who want to teach and who have minimal skills.
It's wages, but it's more than that.
If you pay very well but continue to make a teaching career a machine to reward political loyalties, nothing is achieved.
And if you pay teachers well and get a meritocratic profession, but the person has to spread out across five schools, that doesn't work either.
You have to think about all the incentives, even the symbolic ones.
He spoke of "meritocracy". How is this term applied in the educational field?
-It means that practice in a certain profession has to be guided by expert knowledge and not by improvisation.
That is why initial teacher training is so important, the fact that it is continuous and that there is a code of ethics.
If you decide to be a nurse or doctor and demonstrate incompetence, there is a panel of specialists to determine if you should be removed from your role.
-Many believe that meritocracy is negative, since social inequality has repercussions in substantial differences in access to opportunities. That "expert knowledge" would not be available to everyone.
-One of the countries where there is greater meritocracy in the entrance to the educational profession is Singapore.
Teachers are well paid and entering a teaching career is as difficult as entering Medicine.
The exercise of the teacher's profession has to do with expert knowledge.
However, in the evolution of educational systems there was a first moment without standards: anyone could teach.
Then, in a second stage of "formalism" it was tried that those who taught had some specific knowledge.
The third stage was with more capable teachers, but still with a rigid posture.
Only in the fourth stage was it possible to personalize the relationship with the students.
There are countries that since then incurred setbacks.
I did not delve into the Argentine educational system,
N. de la R.: Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
), I am impressed that there have been so many setbacks.
There must be other interests that have captured the educational system, outside of the children.
-Federalism, here, generates an uneven scenario and national governance is poor. There is political alternation, but the lack of consensus on long-term educational projects becomes an obstacle. Nothing indicates that teachers are going to stop working two shifts and in "taxi" mode.
-The development of a system is an evolutionary process, based on its resources.
I understand that there are two shifts because the expenditure per student in Argentina is very different from that in Finland.
Each teacher works the equivalent of two teachers.
One wishes it were not so, but reality is what it is.
When one looks at history, all countries have had to do more with less.
The issue of resources and poverty are sometimes an excuse for not making better use of what is allocated to Education.
-The Federal Education Law establishes that 6% of GDP be allocated to Education.
That's very good.
-But (reports the Argentine Observatory for Education) that goal was only met three times in the last decade.
-Of course... Latin America has the memory of a terrible time: the 80s. The countries were highly indebted and adjustment programs were applied that contracted public spending.
The most affected areas were Health and Education.
I remember stepping on the Pizzurno Palace.
It was all so sad.
Disinvestment in Education...
-With 100% inflation, the panorama may not be very different now.
-The lesson of that lost decade is that it takes 30 years to build an educational system, but it is destroyed quickly, in 5 years.
You stop investing and the good people leave: they start driving taxis, working in hotels.
But think back to 1945: there were 2.8 billion inhabitants and only two out of five people had set foot in a school.
It was 80 years ago.
Now there are 8,000 million inhabitants and 95% had access to school for a considerable number of years.
It is the most important silent revolution that humanity had.
-You are an optimist!
-We must replace the prophets of disaster with the prophets of hope.
No one is moved by saying the world is ending.
This is what happens with the discourse of climate change.
One of the things that has allowed human beings to progress is imagination.
Think of the Declaration of Human Rights.
After the extermination of the Holocaust, a group of people said “
a better world is possible
”.
It was an exercise in poetry: imagining a world that doesn't exist.
Say “
all human beings have the right to education
”.
You have to see the glass half full.
Without underestimating how important it is to resolve the structural conditions that limit the system, one must ask how we are going to use these four hours that we have the children in the classroom.
From the atrocities of Nazism to Messi: education, democracy and teamwork
At the age of 64, with part of his life in his native Venezuela and most of it in the United States, decades of work in Education (in organizations such as UNESCO, the World Bank or Harvard University) have made of Fernando Reimers a great observer.
Reimers, a Harvard Education expert, evaluated Argentina's possibilities of improving its educational system.
Actually, an acute diagnostician: “When I think of Argentina, I think of Sarmiento.
For his time, he was a genius.
But I have no doubt that in the context that he is describing for Argentina he must be a highly politicized figure.
Then he started -comfortably- to talk about politics.
Perhaps because Education is forced to swim in those waters.
He dives in: “The issues of the world continue to be civilization and barbarism... I was lucky to be born in Venezuela the year it ceased to be a dictatorship.
It has one of authoritarian governments, but when I was born, the country tried to be a democracy.
Democracy is an imperfect system, under construction, but the narrative of democracy gives the idea that we all have the same rights.
And so, imperfect though it may be, this narrative allows characters like Martin Luther King, for example, to emerge and lead to great achievements.”
The solidity of democratic systems is a great concern for Reimers: “Today, in the post-pandemic, we are surrounded by merchants of the educational crisis.
We must not forget that in the 1918 pandemic, the big winner was a character initially considered a political clown, who grew up in a few years: Adolf Hitler.
-Do you suggest that the Covid crises represent an opportunity for the emergence of certain characters? There are those who think that something like this could be happening in Argentina...
-Clear.
Democracy is very fragile.
The pandemic weakened her even more.
There are neo-Nazi groups that deny the equality of people and promote toxic ideologies, postulating the superiority of some over others.
The danger of intolerant populism is being seen all over the world.
And it doesn't have to be on the right.
Reimers qualified these sayings with some of his reference figures.
In particular, the Venezuelan writer and former politician Luis Alberto Machado: "He is the one who developed an interest in Education in me."
“His first thesis is that intelligence and talent are not innate: they depend on the development of opportunities.
His second thesis, that if talent is not innate, he said, the obligation of a democratic State is to give opportunities to everyone, "he said, and stressed:" My mission in life is to advance to this.
Help develop the talent of the most marginal kids.
The big challenge is scaling.
May Education reach all children”.
For that, there must be 'a team', he concluded: “I don't remember if it was Messi or it was the coach, who at a certain point said 'we all win'.
They are not individuals.
The evaluation of the team and the opposing team (without which one cannot win) is essential.
The human being progresses when he unites with others ”.
Itinerary
A Venezuelan-born psychologist,
Fernando Reimers
received a PhD in Education from Harvard, an American university at whose Graduate School he directs the Global Education Innovation Initiative.
He is a teacher of International Education and a prolific theoretician of the educational world, with 45 books of which he is the author or editor.
He advises governments, universities, foundations, and educational organizations, has been a member of UNESCO's Commission on The Future of Education, and has worked at the Central University of Venezuela, at the Harvard Institute for International Development, and at the World Bank.
Right now
A book:
The Little Prince
A musical reference:
Andrea Boccelli
A sport:
The ultimate frisbee
One team:
The Red Sox (Red Sox)
A drink:
tomato juice
A meal:
The Venezuelan dish pabellón criollo
A place:
The Iguazú Falls
A memory:
Participating in the end-of-year plays at the Juan Jacobo Rousseau School, in Caracas, where I began my studies.
A passion:
Learning from my students.
A wish:
A world in which each person can be the architect of their own life.
look too
How to fail in a necessary change
An education guru reveals a new classroom trend that "this year is going to explode"