Could Hegel Pass a Competitive Examination?

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Giovanni Pelegi Torres

In every political intrigue series worth its salt, there is always a character who tells the one in charge exactly what they want to hear. Literature, from Aesop to Vázquez Montalbán, is teeming with such figures. In real-life intrigues, often stranger than fiction, power has always had a soft spot for flatterers. Yet, in westerns, sycophants and opportunists, those who drift wherever the strings are pulled, are punished for their moral mediocrity and lack of critical thought. Heaven help them if they cross Clint Eastwood.

Machiavelli reminds us that a wise ruler surrounds themselves with those who discreetly point out their flaws. The Ancien Régime collapsed, in part, because it was incapable of reform — not only lacking the means but also the institutional will to absorb the systemic critique posed by the Enlightenment.

Political theory took note. Thus, the philosophy of the liberal rule of law upholds the civil service, recognizing that certain functions of the state must operate according to their own logic, immune to the capricious swings of political power. Judges, tax officials, police officers, and, crucially, teachers — among others — cannot be appointed, dismissed, or pressured based on partisan interests. When this principle is violated — as we now witness with Elon Musk’s enablers in the United States — we slip into the shadows of authoritarianism, echoing the darker chapters of our recent past.

Liberal democracy holds firm as long as public services are run not by flatterers but by those rigorously trained and objectively qualified for their roles. This is the cornerstone of republicanism — the essence of the res publica.

This supposed objectivity, legitimised by the intersubjective dimension of shared experiences, has traditionally been expressed through a series of examinations designed to assess candidates’ knowledge and abilities. The bad news is that this has changed in competitive examinations for teaching positions. While a theoretical test—intended to demonstrate academic knowledge—remains, the practical component, which involves drafting and defending a teaching plan, has transformed into a performance where the key acronyms and slogans of pedagogical trends are ceremoniously displayed.

Trainers openly admit it: before the selection panel, candidates must recite the magic words—UDL (Universal Design for Learning), competences, SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), digitalisation, entrepreneurship, globalisation, personalisation, gamification, learning to learn… These terms cannot be omitted. Often detached from the realities of teaching, they are not meant to assess a candidate’s experience or expertise in their subject but rather their adherence to a prescribed narrative. We could analyse the ideological underpinnings of this narrative—I would not hesitate to call it neoliberal. However, beyond that, the gravest issue is that what is being evaluated is not competence, but loyalty to a given discourse.

Candidates have no choice but to repeat these terms, delivering speeches that resemble Silicon Valley coaching seminars more than reflections on classroom teaching. Often, neither the candidates nor the examination panel fully understand what is being said. A concrete example: the definitions of formativa and formadora (formative assessment) provided during my master’s degree were entirely different from those taught in the exam preparation academy. Yet, this discrepancy appears to matter little.

We have resigned ourselves to saturating these examinations with terminology that, though often disguised as scientific and technical, ultimately undermines the objectifying intersubjectivity that lends public legitimacy to the selection process for civil servants. This occurs because the content presented lacks both the scientific transparency necessary for rigorous evaluation and the practical tradition that has historically underpinned the civil service.

None of this suggests that change is impossible. The problem lies in the fact that these changes have been imposed without meaningful dialogue with teaching professionals and with an air of experimentation. In 2015, UNESCO praised the use of mobile devices in classrooms; now, it has reversed course and recommends their removal¹. This is why education is a field where a certain degree of conservatism is necessary—a position advocated by none other than Antonio Gramsci, a thinker hardly suspected of ideological conservatism. Yet, we have accepted this farce, a symptom of the decay of an educational system that no longer believes in itself². At this point, it is worth recalling Hegel in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820):

“Despotism signifies the condition of lawlessness in general, in which the particular will as such, whether of a monarch or of the people (ochlocracy), counts as law (or rather replaces law), whereas sovereignty is to be found specifically under lawful and constitutional conditions as the moment of ideality of the particular spheres and functions [within the state]”³.

For Hegel, public welfare depends on an independent civil service. When the symbolic function of law is supplanted by external interests—such as the commercial agendas of foundations sponsoring these narrative and material changes—or when political power imposes criteria that, I do not think it an exaggeration to say, have profoundly altered the nature of the teaching profession, the civil service enters into crisis. And with it, the very theory of the rule of law. Today, power refines itself by reshaping the civil service—through subtle, fluid discursive shifts that generate confusion but are devastatingly effective. By the way, competitive examination hearings are public precisely because every citizen has the right to understand how the state perpetuates itself through a logic that should be both transparent and comprehensible.

A final note: if, as Minister Pilar Alegría now suggests, teachers are to assess their students’ self-esteem alongside their academic knowledge, we might as well begin drafting the obituary for republican meritocracy. A state that surrenders itself so completely to narratives and subjectivities is, ultimately, a state in public bankruptcy. Our particular brand of educational illiberalism is simply set to the tune of progressivism.

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^[1] “El Futuro del aprendizaje 3: ¿Qué tipo de pedagogías se necesitan para el siglo XXI?” (2015) VS Global education monitoring report, 2023: technology in education: a tool on whose terms? (2023)

² As Xavier Massó wrote a few days ago, “this is by no means the only farce of this educational carnival”: https://educationalevidence.com/elogio-del-hipocrita-sympathy-for-the-devil/

³ Original quote from Hegel’s book Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by Allen W. Wood.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons