Purchena Door
“If more than half of the students need private classes, it can be concluded that the training they are given is insufficient or a way to keep them busy while their parents go to work or do other activities”
A young man appears on the screen with a microphone and is conducting a street survey in Madrid. He stops other adolescents and young people like him and asks them what the cardinal points are. No idea. What is that, answers a girl. Another young man is asked about the number of days in a year and, well, he was right when he said that there are 365. He then asks how many days are there in a leap year and the respondent says that it is 369. In front of a map of the world, he asks other young people to Place countries like Argentina, Ecuador, Spain, Mexico, Japan… no one knows and when he asks a girl to point to Mongolia on the map, he almost faints. For some the capital of China is Hong Kong; for another young woman, Luján or something like that and recognizes that he is going to go on to a career. There are those who do not complicate their lives and when asked what a triangle with three equal sides is called, they smugly answer that triangle. When asked what an isolated place in the desert where there is water and vegetation grows is called, a boy ponders and asks, in turn, what is a place? A girl who studies Art asks what the athletes who practice judo are called, to which she answers without hesitation that they are Jewish.
Anyway. It is a video that circulates on the networks and I don’t know if it will be real or a montage, although in this second case those questioned are extraordinary actors because of how well they interpret the role. Now, what is not a hoax or false news is that more than half of the primary and secondary students in this country receive private classes. One has left high school and university a long time ago but remembers that at the time very few students received private classes, perhaps in the summer to take the September exams or at specific times. Now it seems like this reinforcement is more than a necessity, an obligation.
What seems clear is that something in the educational system of this country is failing. Or even worse than the society we are forming and the education we give our children at home leaves much to be desired. If more than half of the students need private classes, it can be concluded that the training given to them is insufficient or a way to keep them occupied while their parents go to work or carry out other activities.
I know professors and teachers and I know of their dedication, honor and professionalism when it comes to teaching and I don’t think they are worse teachers than the ones I had. So what is wrong? Well, I don’t know, but what I do know is that either this problem is faced or we are going badly because many of our young people arrive at university without knowing the capital of China or without being able to locate Brazil on a map. So I wonder what training they receive in their high school years. And, even, in his university years, because to get to it and to get out of it, you will have to prove something, I say. On a certain occasion I had some journalists as an intern who wrote the word investiture with M and B, that is to say ‘imbassy’. They admitted to me that in the journalism school they had not read books and, what is worse for future journalists, they did not read newspapers either.
A few days ago they were talking on a radio about journalism students. They were university professors explaining some of the problems that social networks were causing for future information professionals. They did not insult the networks or the Internet, but they assured that their students were not capable of distinguishing between information and opinion. Something so basic and so sensitive to keep a society well informed, those who must do it do not differentiate between one and the other.
Most of the young students (one should never generalize), in addition to not reading books, are not able to maintain attention in a lecture for 20 minutes. However, these young people have no problem staying for hours with their mobile phones in hand, receiving information and non-information through social networks and the Internet. Thus, it is understandable that they do not know how to distinguish between information and opinion, or between good information and false information because they consume everything without any type of criteria.
As things are, either this changes or we continue to release young people into the world who do not know what an oasis is or what the cardinal points are. But the accent must not be placed exclusively on young people and educators, but also on parents who have true ignoramuses under their roof and do not find out. Or they don’t care.
