Barcelona Mobile phones, poor educational results, lack of discipline… Educating children is an increasingly difficult challenge and the obstacles keep piling up. Educating children has never been as difficult as it is now? This is what the geographer and pedagogue Pilar Benejam and the pedagogue Xavier Besalú tried to answer this Tuesday in a conversation moderated by the deputy director of the ARA, Ignasi Aragay, at the headquarters of the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (IEC).
“Education has been in crisis for approximately 2,000 years, but it is a very topical issue,” acknowledged Aragay before giving way to Benejam, who at the age of 86 has used his experience to analyze what has failed to going from moments of “points of hope”, a few decades ago, to reaching the current worrying scenario. “Our students are the way they are because society is the way it is,” defended the geographer, who insisted that individualism and the search for success have blurred the role of the school in a society marked by rankings and ‘obsession with excellence. “When I feel excellence my hair stands on end. There is no one excellent, only the ham of jabugo. The word of education is improvementno excellence“, has said.
Picking up on Benejam’s thread, Xavier Besalú has lamented how, beyond what happens at school, families have also been stripped of the resources they used to help their children grow. “We have told them that tools such as obedience, discipline or punishment are useless, but we have not given them new tools to educate”, he criticized. In the same sense, he agreed with Benejam when warning of the problem of individualism and an “Amazon society” in which one’s own well-being comes before everything else. “It’s clear that this model has advantages, but we have to ask ourselves what we want as a society, because we can’t walk the path of life alone. References are very important on this path,” he insisted.
The two pedagogues have highlighted the problem and the opportunity that global digitization represents. “What are the influencers? How have we created such an idiotic society that reveres people who do not stand out in anything?” Benejam lamented. In the same vein, Besalú has warned of the problem of a digitization that invades everything even though it “escapes the supervision of the adults”: the internet brings children and teenagers into contact with aspects “so far reserved for adults such as sexuality, violence or drugs”.
The teacher training solution
Beyond x-raying the current situation, the deputy director of the ARA has asked the speakers for possible solutions to improve the state of education. Solutions that, as usual, call for improving the training and selection of teachers, but also for letting them work.
“A teacher must want to teach and not just look for a chair for life and little work”, claimed Benejam, for whom one of the current problems lies in the selection – or more specifically, the lack of selection – of the faculty Despite recognizing the work of unions in fighting for the working conditions of teachers, the geographer warned that “the profession needs to be dignified and we need unions that are interested in the quality of education and not only in improving their schedules,” he insisted, without forgetting the fact that excessive bureaucracy and lack of autonomy are a growing problem in educational centers. In the same vein, Besalú has questioned the current demands of the teaching career: “The problem is not in the young students, but in what happens within the universities”. In addition, he insisted that the hopelessness experienced in university classrooms and in society is then transmitted to the teachers and, in turn, to the students.
Finally, the great question has been raised: “What do you need to do to have good teachers?” Benejam has been clear. “You must enjoy your profession. Students must see you enjoying yourself while you learn.” But he also gave a harsh warning: “Whoever doesn’t do it well, spoils the school and, what’s worse, every school year spoils twenty children.”
2024-05-07 19:30:58
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