10/22/2020 7:49 PM
Clarín.com
Opinion
Updated 10/22/2020 7:49 PM
The 190 pesos worth a dollar have Argentina altered.
Obviously.
Nobody talks about anything else, because we have already experienced several times what happens in these situations where things
go awry and nobody seems to be right about the solution
.
But on Thursday another number was known, as serious or more serious, and went unnoticed: the Aprender 2019 exams revealed that 72% of the boys in the last year of high school do not reach a satisfactory level in Mathematics and 42%
do not
directly
understand its basics
.
They could not solve
problems like this
: “In a club, 200 members practice swimming and represent 25% of all members.
How many members does the club have?
150, 225, 250 or 800? "
The report also scares when it says that out of every 100 boys who start the first year, only 63 finish high school, and that
only 29 do so in a timely manner
, at 17 or 18 years old.
There is more data to terrify us, because it not only shows the educational catastrophe but also
the inequality
.
In households with a high socioeconomic level, 24% of the boys do not understand the basics, a percentage that stretches to 64% in low-income households (remember that 6 out of 10 boys are poor in Argentina).
Or, to take another parameter, 52% of those who go to state schools (incidentally: half of them do not have sewers) do not understand anything about Mathematics, while "only" 25% of those who attend suffer the same to a private school.
Now,
the truth is that this does not matter to almost anyone
.
Polls say it out loud.
In a survey by D'Alessio Irol / Berensztein in September, on Social and Political Humor, the ten issues that most concern are inflation, insecurity, economic uncertainty, economic consequences of the coronavirus, fear of the coronavirus as a disease, the judicial impunity of Cristina Kirchner , lack of proposals for growth, subsidies for those who do not deserve it, deepening of the stocks and possible corruption in the Macri government.
Education does not figure.
In another, from Synopsis, from October, the “main citizen concerns” are corruption, inflation, health, unemployment, insecurity and, last, far and away, education.
Why is
the issue not a priority in Argentina
when it is perfectly known that the relationship between the level of development of a country and the level of education of its inhabitants is direct?
It could be said that the dollar is at $ 190.
And also that
the political class is not moved by the needle
because it is a problem of resolution in the medium or long term and nobody looks beyond the next elections.
But as some specialists argue, such as Gabriel Sánchez Zinny, former Minister of Education of María Eugenia Vidal in the province of Buenos Aires, it also happens that the transformations in public education (such as health) are driven by the middle classes, because they are the ones that they demand better services.
And in Argentina
the middle class today goes to private school
, expelled from the state school to a large extent by teacher strikes: 50% of the City's students study in private schools and 38% in the Province.
This is nowhere near the case in any of the world's developed countries, where those who choose private institutions are either highly religious or outrageously wealthy.
The poor performance of the boys in Mathematics tests also shows how badly they are taught it, due to the shortage of teachers in the subject, their poor level and the defects of the study plans, all issues that return to point out, as in a vicious circle, a more general problem: in the country the Social Sciences are overvalued to the detriment of the Exact.
We manufacture more lawyers and psychologists than engineers
, when we should bet, in order to grow, to invert the equation.
Students from the Eduardo Latzina Technical School No. 35, in Villa Real, in the recent return to face-to-face classes for a few.
To alleviate the disaster, which reflects the situation prior to the year lost by the pandemic, Minister Nicolás Trotta promised a plan of "4,000 million pesos to follow the trajectories of students" and blamed "Macri's divestment."
Trotta, it is worth remembering,
spent the year fighting against the return to face-to-face classes in tune with the teachers' unions
.
"We are going to prioritize the return of those who are finishing a cycle of 7th or 5th or the first stages of literacy," he said ... in May. Only after seven months of quarantine did he admit that the coronavirus vaccine could not be expected to return to classrooms.
Those who know that Trotta actually aspired to be Minister of Labor say, but that the influence of his mentor, Víctor Santa María - head of the Buenos Aires goalkeepers, presidential friend and creator of the Metropolitan University for Education and Worker, where today Minister was rector -
reached only for Education
.
Better metaphors are not achieved.
Look also
The PISA test reveals that young Argentines are among the most “unaware” of pandemics
After the closure of a private school in Ramos Mejía, there are at least 20 others in critical situation
