“Spain has reached the point where adding more resources has no clear return.”
Barcelona, May 23 (European Press) –
OECD education director Andreas Schleicher warned of a “growing gap” between the aspirations of students in Catalonia and the needs of the labor market.
This is what he said on Thursday during his speech at the round table “Education as a lever of productivity” of the 39th meeting of the Economic Department – held at the Palais des Congrès de Catalunya from Wednesday to Friday -. , along with the Chancellor of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), Ángel Vito, and the General Manager of the HP Barcelona Campus, Ramon Pastor.
Schleicher said that the results of Catalonia in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2022 report and Spain as a whole show “a decline in the level of results, not radical, but a trend in the Western world.”
However, he assessed that Spain showed a “fairly balanced combination” between academic results and other skills such as the strength of social relationships.
The OECD Education Director stressed that the pandemic “was a small part of the fall,” while highlighting the impact of technology which, in his opinion, opens the door to enhanced personalization but at the same time has had a negative impact. Impact on students’ attention span.
More resources
To reverse this trend in Spain, Schleicher considered that the country had “reached the point where adding more resources had no clear return,” so he emphasized how to invest them, in the same sense, and it was not. Supporting increasing teaching hours.
Instead, he chose to give students confidence in the possibility of improvement – he called it a growth mindset – to increase the productivity of the educational system – learning obtained in the same hours – and to work on the quality of education. Teachers and the nature of learning.
Schleicher exemplified this by rhetorically asking whether students in math class were learning formulas or how to think like professionals: “We keep teaching people to believe what’s in the textbook and not question it, which is a question that has been repeated before.” It extended again to the Western world as a whole.
Regarding the difference between public and private schools, he stressed that “there is no significant difference between the performance of schools.”
Angels veto
The chancellor of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), Ángeles Vito, defended that the Spanish education system faces “financial problems” due to the level of resources it receives, but agreed that this is not the only point of improvement. But this – as he put it – is facing a comprehensive problem.
He emphasized that “it is impossible to rely solely on recent graduates” to face digital and economic transformations, which is why he criticized three premises that he sees as prevailing in society and wrong: that higher education aims at the 18-year-old, that educational paths are linear, and the rejection of technology (which it chooses to integrate).
Ramon Pastor
Ramon Pastor, General Manager of the HP Campus in Barcelona, explained that the world of work requires profiles with a very deep knowledge of technology, but at the same time the ability to adapt to new information and areas of knowledge: “Basically, to build on that.”
He lamented that “too early specialization” such as today’s could be a problem because it has a negative impact on students’ technological and scientific bases.
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