Education: Between Scylla and Charybdis

Odysseus (detail of the painting) confronted with the choice between Scylla and Charybdis, Henry Fuseli, 1794

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Andreu Navarra

On 16 September 2025, the Fundació Bofill surprised us in Barcelona with an unexpected turn. At its first press conference of the new academic year, it argued that school curricula should be simpler and “clearer”, and above all that they should spell out in much greater detail which skills are required to attain a desirable level of reading comprehension. Many of us could scarcely believe it. Implicitly, two facts were being acknowledged—facts that had long been all too evident: that competence-based curricula display obvious shortcomings, and that “standards”, that much-invoked notion of standards, have indeed fallen, or at the very least are no longer at a desirable level and are in some way a cause for concern. And none of this implied that the speaker had joined some rabid neo-fascist sect or metamorphosed into a sadistic monster. This admission broke with decades of denial of the educational problem in Catalonia, but we will have to go somewhat further if we wish to uncover the real motivations behind this protean ideological shift.

Not even David Bowie could have displayed greater skill in disguise. Put simply, it seems that pedagogical populism has finally entered into crisis, as its media defenders have repeatedly exposed themselves to public ridicule on regional television. That ridicule, combined with the evident failure of LOMLOE-style policies, may have rendered radical competence-based ideology unattractive in a context of public polarisation; or it may simply mean that comprehensive, neo-Rousseauian sectarianism has ceased to be profitable. If this new direction were to be confirmed, we might move towards a new situation that would require two distinct warnings.

First, we should intensify our efforts to excise from our legislation the entire apparatus of socio-economic domination that goes under the label of “competentialism”. The ultra-utilitarian education that has ravaged our schools is not merely incapable of sustaining a minimally defensible public discourse; it has also lost its supposedly progressive alibi. What is progressive, quite simply, is teaching reading, writing and basic arithmetic to our primary pupils, leaving no one behind by increasing resources; and progressive, too, is building a culturally and scientifically robust secondary education, without which only the economic elite has access to quality employment and positions of governance, freely reproducing itself through the deliberate degradation of citizenship. Put differently, competence-based schooling generates such levels of inequality that it ultimately becomes intolerable for any democratic system. This is precisely what has happened in the United States, where the dictatorship of neo-medievalism, imperial militarism, authoritarian terror, a drive towards social suicide and the most primitive hatred have taken control of the nation.

We may therefore conclude that the competence-based phase is merely the prologue to the emergence of a reactionary, virilist and neo-authoritarian turn, even more dangerous than its deconstructive prelude. Resentment towards Foucauldian leftism opens the door to Foucauldian rightism— that is, to the pure and unvarnished antiliberalism of irrationalists as they devour one another in the great jungle of posthumanism. This traditionalist and authoritarian doctrine is precisely what we must prevent from taking hold once all the mirages and sleights of hand of postmodern nihilism have finally collapsed.

So which path should we take? The path of democratic balance. That path requires the re-democratisation of teaching staffs, the establishment of methodological pluralism, the abandonment of the demonisation of memory (and of literature, philosophy, book reading and rational science), and renewed trust in didactic transmissivism and the benefits it can bring in the medium and long term. It also entails abandoning digital solutionism and pedagogical magical thinking, and working for and within concrete social reality rather than for lucrative fantasies, Manichaean schemes, teacher-phobic proposals or deconstructive utopias.

That entire denialist world must be left behind, but without ushering in a neo-imperial Restoration. This is so provided we conclude that it is in everyone’s interest to continue living in a democracy, for which a certain dose of Habermasian utopia remains indispensable—that is, a commitment to egalitarian republicanism sustained by a responsible and well-informed citizenry. What we must restore is dialogical reason, not the ‘Law of the Strongest’ in a fully deregulated world. All this holds unless we have already decided to continue degrading our public deliberative spaces in order to immolate ourselves in pursuit of millenarian and self-destructive desires. From today onwards, we must decide whether we wish to sink further into nightmares of unreality and end up mired in a field sown with hatred, or whether we are prepared to undertake the enormous effort of humanistic reinterpretation that our educational system has been crying out for decades. The truly authoritarian temptation—the Trumpian one, not the imaginary spectre of logicians—will begin to grow powerful from now on, once it becomes profitable for the gurus of the so-called dark Enlightenment imported from the American continent, and once the metamorphosis of certain former champions of neo-capitalist charisma is complete.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons