Óscar is called that, but we will not give many more details to preserve his privacy. He is 15 years old, he is studying second year of ESO at a public institute on the outskirts of Valencia, and he spends many hours in the hallways, expelled from class. One of his teachers explains: “It's not that he has violent behavior, nor is he a bad kid, or a piece of shit, what happens is that he gets bored and just fools around.” He repeated his first year of ESO, which didn't help things improve. “In the first quarter of this year, things went badly for me. I passed PE only,” he says, which means he failed 10 subjects. He began to feel “unmotivated” in sixth grade, and since then the courses have become “very long”; “I have to come, but I don't like school very much.” There are subjects that he has never been able to do, like mathematics or English. “Others interested me a little, but there are some teachers who also…” he says. His father is a construction manager, his mother is a housewife, and he would like to study electromechanics, although he still does not know what he has to do to achieve that intermediate vocational training degree. On Wednesday of last week he had an appointment to talk to the counselor at his center.
According to a survey recently presented by the Cotec Foundation, 74.2% of the population, and what is more significant, 79.6% of the education professionals (the vast majority, teachers) interviewed, consider that in compulsory education there are “students who do not want to be there, and that makes it difficult for the rest to learn.” The lack of interest, often radical, of a part of the students in what they hear in class, concentrated above all in Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO), and the negative consequences that it has for them in the form of academic failure, and for The student body as a whole requires reflection, says Ainara Zubillaga, director of education at Cotec, especially when initiatives such as extending compulsory schooling to age 18 are proposed, as the State School Council recently did.
In 1990, the Organic Law for the Organization of the Educational System, the Logse, raised the age of compulsory education from 14 to 16 years, and established the educational structure that is still in force today. When that law was debated, two models were put on the table. “One was called 12-15+1, and it consisted of three years of common secondary school, from ages 12 to 15, and in the last year, +1, the students could choose between a high school course and others. , by FP. That is, it was mandatory, but no longer comprehensive, in the sense that they did not have the same programs. The other model was 12-16, which is the one that ended up being imposed,” explains César Coll, one of the authors of both that educational reform and the last one, that of Lomloe. The 12-16 won because it had the support of a good part of the left, which understood that adopting the 12-15+1 meant segregating students, and of the right, in favor of extending compulsory secondary school until age 18, among other reasons. because this would have provided private concerted education with even more years of public subsidy.
“I think it was a mistake, because that last already differentiated course, which is the model that exists in France and other countries, would have reduced the problems when it came to finding meaning in the learning that causes everyone to have to study the same thing, and I would have personalized it much more,” says Coll, professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology at the University of Barcelona.
The idea of 12-15+1 was defeated, but the successive educational reforms of ESO have been advancing, however, in the same direction through curricular diversification programs (in which kids study with adapted content) and FP basic (which combines theoretical and professional teachings). “But it has been done through strange measures,” Coll laments, “and, unfortunately, not as something structural and positive, but as a path for those who do not do well in their studies, a stigma that should be avoided.”
This nature of a late addition or a fix also has the consequence that the offer of these alternative routes to complete the ESO is limited. “There are many kids who are not doing well academically, because ESO is still academic, and those who would like to do something more applied, more professional, but they do not have the possibility,” says counselor Javier Cortés. At its public institute in Cata-roja, in Valencia, about 800 students study. Of them, 30 study in the curricular diversification programs, when in Cortés's opinion it would be better for them to double, but the regulations do not allow it. Of the other alternative to finish ESO, Basic FP, the institute only offers two degrees. One from Administrative Services, which is very unsuitable for kids who hate spending the morning sitting at a desk. And another from Domestic Activities and Building Cleaning, which, says Cortés, “is the poor brother even within Basic FP”; “They don't find it attractive at all, many say: 'I don't want to clean.” Situations like the one described by Cortés are repeated in most of Spain. “And at that age,” adds the counselor, “the normal thing is that they do not want or do not have the necessary means to travel to another location to study another cycle that would be better for them.”
Social classes
Manuel Fernández Navas, professor of Didactics at the Faculty of Malaga, defends, on the other hand, a vision similar to the one that was once opposed to 12-15+1 from the left. “If you set itineraries in a section of compulsory education, what will happen is that the majority of the population from a certain social class will go to one of them, and those from another class will go to the other. That is quite documented, and it is putting the educational system at the service of social stratification,” he says. Fernández Navas does not deny that there is a problem with unmotivated kids, but he believes that the key lies in changing what is done in ESO, taking into account that it is a mandatory stage that must compensate for inequalities. The “lesson, textbook, homework and exam” model, in reality, is boring, he continues, to practically all adolescents, but it is tolerated better by those whose families exert pressure on them to study, who tend to have average socioeconomic and cultural profiles and high.
“When the only way to access knowledge about school activity is the grade, it benefits a certain social class. But when access to knowledge has a use value, that is, when it helps students understand the world around them, to solve problems in their daily lives, knowledge makes more sense for other social classes. It is about putting students in situations in which knowledge can be applied,” argues the professor from the University of Malaga. “As? Well, as bad as it sounds, we see it in American movies. “The children do real experiments in class, they work making newspapers, radio, workshops… There are many ways to do it.” An approach of this type, admits Fernández Navas, requires increasing resources and reducing the ratio of students per teacher. “I'm not saying it's easy, but it's what we should try to do. And there are already many schools and institutes, many colleagues, who work like this.”
The problem of demotivation in ESO does not come so much from the structure of the stage, says Enrique Roca, former president of the State School Council, as from having maintained a high rate of grade repetition, which he considers the “main cause of discouragement in students” and explains, in his opinion, “in most cases, the desire to abandon studies.” Roca advocates drastically reducing it, as almost all developed countries have done, and simultaneously offering students “training paths in line with their abilities and interests”, including more facilities to access Basic FP.
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