From the classroom to the TV studio: towards the void of a metaphysics of tubes?

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Giovanni Pelegi Torres

Are Josep González Cambray and Rosa Romà the same person? Has anyone ever seen them together? For weeks now I’ve been struck by the managerial similarities between the two. From that Department of Education to this Catalan Audiovisual Media Corporation.

Cambray and Romà both come from the world of advertising and marketing. Their management styles reveal just how much they prioritise visibility strategies and the creation of narratives through carefully crafted communication techniques. Both seem to disdain the building of solid content as an indicator of quality.

In recent months, 3Cat, the new umbrella brand of the CCMA, has gained momentum—a decision that has stirred quite a commotion. Romà argues that the CCMA brand was little known, but I don’t think it needed to be; it was, after all, merely the managerial entity. Now, however, two strong and well-established brands—TV3 and Catalunya Ràdio—are losing prominence.

In a statement issued on 25 September, the Corporation’s Works Councils expressed their concern about the outsourcing of services, corporate interference, changes in working dynamics, and the absence of dialogue with staff about these transformations. Beyond these criticisms, there’s been a wave of discontent on social media about 3Cat’s new programmes—widely condemned as devoid of substance and steeped in a diglossia that discriminates against Catalan.

This tune sounds familiar. Whenever I hear talk about the need to reach wider audiences, I’m reminded of the rhetoric of “reaching all learners” and meaningful learning in education, which so often leads to the dilution of content. Nor do I believe that higher audience ratings are, in themselves, necessarily a good thing. When critical voices within the workforce are dismissed, I can’t help recalling certain press conferences from Via Augusta¹. And when I see such an extreme glorification of marketing, I can’t help thinking that the same mistake is being repeated: placing the wrapping before the content, and before the value of the professionals themselves. Believing that slogans, logos, and catchphrases can somehow improve reality; that three new taglines will solve everything; that all previous work is obsolete and that what we need is more flexibility and blah, blah, blah…

Teachers know this story all too well. The dissolution of academic content, of subjects once based on solid and structured curricula; the great carnival of unreflective project work, of indiscipline and deregulation; the liquidity imposed upon our professional functions, or the sectarianism of coaching. The quality and robustness of content—what ultimately guarantees a high standard of education—has been subordinated to the shop-window display of knowledge that is ever more meagre and increasingly outsourced. From teachers to traders… and from journalists to showmen? Let’s hope not.

The lack of understanding of what constitutes a genuine public service leads us into these scenarios of institutional decay, saturated with kleptocracy (sadly all too common in Catalonia, and deserving of many more articles), which, as Hannah Arendt reminds us, are symptoms of a crisis both of culture and of education. For years we’ve been confusing learning with entertainment—and now it seems we’re confusing information with entertainment too. The fashion for performative progressivism brands as reactionary the essential transmission of a cultural inheritance that, according to Arendt, lies at the heart of education. High-quality public media—like the education system itself—should prioritise the creation of a cultured society, one in which entertainment need not be trivial, nor, worse still, an unreflective legitimisation of clichés devoid of critical vision. To lose the professional and genuinely republican role of teachers and of good journalism is to demolish the very foundations of a liberal society. I fail to see what is progressive or positive about changes that are, in essence, profoundly reactionary. The linguist Ferdinand de Saussure once said that content without form is empty. I believe that form without content is too.

I recently read one of Amélie Nothomb’s best-known novels, The Character of Rain (Métaphysique des tubes in the original), where the “tube” is a metaphor for a near-automatic child who swallows life passively, paying no attention to what she is given. The metaphysics of the tube is the same illusion that makes us believe innovation is always good and progress unfailingly positive. Let us not turn education—or public broadcasting, with its inherent cultural and educational mission—into a factory of tubes.

And finally: why are there no seasoned teachers (or journalists) in senior positions within public administration?

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¹Via Augusta refers to the Barcelona headquarters of the Catalan Department of Education, often used metonymically to refer to the department itself.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons