- TEACHER TALES
- 31 de January de 2025
- No Comment
- 7 minutes read
Educational Innovation or Fraudulent Corruption

Educational Innovation or Fraudulent Corruption

I often find myself in lectures where I am told that I must not deliver lectures. I am also informed that I must innovate in my teaching without requiring students to memorise. When I ask how I am supposed to impart knowledge while innovating without lectures or memorisation, the response is always the same: I should adopt the innovative model of “competency-based education”. However, no one ever explains exactly how to do this. In short, I am being sold a concept without instructions on how to implement it. That, quite simply, is a scam. Imagine going to a doctor for treatment, only to be told that you must heal yourself—without any guidance or prescription. Does that sound absurd? Well, that is precisely what happens in training sessions where lecturers deliver traditional classes instructing teachers that traditional classes should be abolished.
Competency-based education not only rejects lectures and memorisation—it also eliminates numerical grading. In Catalonia, for instance, this system was introduced in primary schools in 2016. Back then, Meritxell Ruiz, the Generalitat de Catalunya (regional government) education minister, accused Spain of using a “19th-century model” while Catalonia had already adopted a “21st-century” approach—one that supposedly valued competencies over rote learning. She made this claim on television in March 2017. Two years later, in 2019, the Catalan government extended this model to all schools, branding it an “innovation”—even though UNESCO had already proposed competency-based education in 1973. Far from being a revolutionary 21st-century idea, it was merely an old concept repackaged as something new.
Yet this model spread further. In 2020, Spain’s national education reform (the LOMLOE law) copied the Catalan approach, accelerating the decline of memorisation across the country. Today, students are no longer valued for their ability to retain and recall knowledge, but for their ability to navigate vaguely defined “competencies”—which often amount to little more than aimless drifting.
A key indicator of quality education is the ability to remember key concepts. Effort is required for knowledge to take root in the mind, and without this effort, learning collapses. The decline of competency-based education is therefore inevitable, as the 2023 PISA reports have already confirmed.
Yet policymakers remain blind to reality. They continue to insist that abandoning memorisation is “innovative”, when in fact, this approach is more than a century old. John Dewey first introduced it in the early 20th century, it was later adopted in Spain in the 1930s under the Republic, revived in the 1960s under Franco’s Minister of Education, Villar Palasí, and has been enshrined in Spanish educational law from the 2007 LOE to the 2020 LOMLOE. All of this, despite the paradox that Dewey himself pointed out in 1929: the real mistake is to take a theory and turn it into law. The rejection of memorisation has been with us for decades and, whether embraced by the left or the right, few today even remember where it came from.
It is not just politicians who push this empty vision of innovation—many educators have also become convinced that because memorisation has been a longstanding practice, it must now be abandoned at all costs. The result is a dangerous belief: that anything new is automatically better, and everything old—no matter how effective—must be discarded. Only a fool would insist that mere innovation equates to improvement; the goal is not to innovate the education system but to refine and enhance it. If you set fire to your house, you have certainly “innovated”— but if you believe you have improved it, do not set fire to everyone else’s. This has been the mistake of romantic pedagogies—they have found it amusing to stage a Valencian Fallas in someone else’s home, as it is far easier to attack and discredit professional didactics than to replace them with effective practices. Pedagogy itself may have value, but not the charlatans who claim to represent it. These individuals, insecure about not belonging to the scientific community—since pedagogy is not a science, lacking the scientific method—desperately cling to anything that appears scientific to gain credibility
Now a new wave of so-called “innovation” has arrived, led by artificial intelligence. Some claim that AI will help students who struggle with vocabulary, grammar, and general knowledge express themselves despite their ignorance and lack of memorisation. Traditional essays and their corrections are disappearing, as students can now generate fully written assignments with the click of a button. Meanwhile, tech companies profit from users’ ignorance, monetising personal data while reducing students’ intellectual engagement to near zero. In this pernicious direction, some have even proposed hybrid education models in which AI takes over part of the teaching process, eliminating classrooms altogether and leaving students to study from home via the internet. No doubt the future will bring great advances, even to the point of introducing specialisations through a secure –I hope– connection to our minds, but predicting the future through impositions can be reckless. The future is uncertain, no matter how much we may want to shape it in a particular direction.
The obsession with “future innovation” has become one of the many delusions of our education system. If we truly want to improve education, we must reinforce, not abandon, the fundamentals. Without a solid grasp of reading, writing, and arithmetic—properly learned and memorised—students will struggle to acquire further knowledge or apply any so-called competencies. Contrary to what some believe, literacy and numeracy will not become obsolete in the digital age—they will become even more crucial. If we truly care about the next generation, we must provide them with a solid foundation in language and mathematics. Only then will they be able to read, learn, and engage meaningfully with the rest of the curriculum. Innovation and artificial intelligence have not made the ability to read, write, and memorise obsolete—they have only made these skills more essential than ever.
Source: educational EVIDENCE
Rights: Creative Commons