Breathe
By Mónica Hernández
The results of the PISA test were so bad that the easiest thing to do is to do what is customary in this country and that sadly no one questions anymore: reject them, disqualify them, annul them. To say an expletive or an insult and everyone goes on with what they were doing before the discovery. It would be wonderful to have a magic wand that would do the same with the object that measures that test: that by witchcraft would disappear the ignorance, the lack of understanding of the texts read, the lack of even basic mathematical mental calculation... and we do not even follow it. It is a pity, because it is possible to calculate the lag (someone said that 16 years of progress in basic education were lost. Note: we are not talking about quantum physics and even less about artificial intelligence. We are only talking about basic education). Short, medium and long term public policies are required. Commitments are required. Will is required. This is where the equation fails. Will. There does not seem to be any, nor is it known where to look for it. Because, who would be better off if Mexico were full of illiterates? I can think of several options, but none of them is encouraging, let alone promising.
As if conjured by my concentration on this column, the WhatsApp alert sounds. It's the chats. One of moms, where someone is looking for a runaway jacket that never came home. The chat goes crazy ringing bells and the lines fill with denials and well wishes for the speedy recovery of the missing garment. I imagine that if someone took it by mistake, they didn't even realize it and it's not hanging on Whatsapp either. Someone comments that there is a "lost and found" section within the school. Would anyone turn around there yet? The rest is gibberish, each one funnier than the next. Someone from the chat room wakes up and starts typing in another, one of several alternates, now the one dedicated to the gift to a teacher. With the SAT chasing small taxpayers and supposedly big fraudsters, those who get to receive fortunes of three or four thousand pesos in their account, payments can only be made in cash. The chat explodes where adults ask for the deposit account, while others ask for cash only. The writing on both sides is repeated ad nauseam.
The Latin word for boredom is an understatement. I accuse myself of having fun with the chat, where everyone writes what they want but no one takes the trouble to read what those before me, those above in the chat, are posting. It is inevitable not to think that as adults, we have not learned to read. To read with comprehension of what is read, with assumption of what someone else writes. We know how to put letters together and understand the general meaning of words. We do not know how to infer, we do not make sense of the meaning. Let's not talk about euphemisms, alliterations, metaphors, juxtapositions, allusions, allegories, hyperboles... if this happens in adults, I don't even want to imagine what awaits these generations of children whose learning process was interrupted by Covid, who are going through the transition from the previous school to the so-called New Mexican School and which, like the mommy chats, is incomprehensible and seems inapplicable, for the time being. Because for the moment, in three six-year terms we have had three school models, one better than the previous one, but without measurable results, which means, words more, words less, that they are useless. What is not quantified does not apply. It reminds me of my distant marketing budgets: as it was not measurable, the investment in a brand was considered an expense. So now they want us to understand that students are going to learn to be good people (of course, just look at the example that children have around them, let alone on screens), because that was the intention of this new program. But as we know, the pantheons are full of good intentions.
We speak then of functional illiteracy which, in general terms, is the inability to use the learning of reading, writing and basic arithmetic for real life. Yes, we know how to read (obviously), but we do not understand what we read. The 140 characters have disabled us to grasp "the substance" of entire paragraphs, of their underlying messages. At the same time, the immediacy of the bombardment of brief messages (in text, images or video) has made us believe that we know how to distinguish an egg from a papaya and we believe that we grasp all the subliminal messages (as our mind surely does) and that is why we take sides, today that polarization is the only thing that seems to define us. Because it is more comfortable to stay in the place we are assigned than to question how we got to a corner. Or if we wanted to be in a corner, in a pole. We do not question this. Because for that, we need to understand what we read, what it means, what those words we click on mean, reading them without reading them. Our mind is selective and our finger has learned to be selective too.
I confess that I do not know the spirit of the New Mexican School, but I do know the sixth grade textbooks. Yes, they contain useful information. Yes, they were elaborated under an indoctrination scheme. But which books do not? Since the presidency of General Lázaro Cárdenas the public school and its spawn, the free textbook, obeyed a line, one that served the interests of the group in power. This has not changed. What has changed is the interest in the result. We need a Vasconcelos (even with his defects). We need an educational revolution, one that prioritizes not only access but elementary education for all, not only for children. There are those who study, for pleasure or necessity, throughout their lives, but they need the infrastructure to achieve it.
How many adults, retired, would like to have finished high school, a career? To discover a passion in one of those subjects that we passed at night and that maybe some of them lifted our curiosity a finger off the ground? Maybe some senior or senior citizen would want to know about geography, literature, volcanoes, sunken ships, pirates and Alexander the Great. Maybe someone would have been a great architect or engineer. Life passed them by and they had to work, perhaps without even finishing primary school, the so-called basic education. Yes, the future is the children and they should be a priority, but also our elders, because we have not broken the circle of illiteracy, not even functional illiteracy.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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