What’s underlying behind curricular areas?

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Xavier Massó

The delirious idea of ​​alien body snatchers living among us is a magnificent metaphor that could well have been inspired by current educational reality: the areas have been living among us for some time, trying to go unnoticed while waiting for the moment to reveal themselves and reinforce an educational model that has been in the making for years and whose concretion constitutes the keystone that was going to allow the building so laboriously erected to be sustained.

But everything seems to indicate that the parousia has so far been unsuccessful. In Catalonia, the court of justice have declared illegal the application of grouping subjects by areas in baccalaureate (high school). The atmosphere of desolation that has spread among the unconditional supporters of the “areas” –usually influential and close to power- seems to indicate that, indeed, this is a hard blow to the Catalan educational model. But what are the areas? Who do they serve? What is the real scope of this ruling? In short, what is laying behind the implementation of areas in high school? Let’s see.

An area is the result of applying a pedagogical criterion of grouping tradicional subjects, considered more or less suitable to a determined purpose, taken all together into a set that, under this name, incorporates them as a single unit of assesment, teaching and curricular organization. It is necessary to point out that we’re not dealing with any kind of epistemologically founded taxonomy, but rather with its dilution in what’s concerning teaching and learning. Likewise, the lack of any established criteria leaves the ex novo creation of areas to the mercy of other types of criteria: economic – minimizing costs by dispensing with specialists in each subject-, corporate – promoting intrusion with the introduction of supposed generalists without any specialty-, professional – privileging certain specialties as the focus of the area, compared to others-, ideological – organizing the areas around a subject with such a bias- clientelist – promoting the control and power of whoever decides it- and, of course, pedagogical – primacy of the method over the function- and academical – disappearance of the specialist teacher and dilution of the contents and of the very idea of ​​a common and structured curriculum.

The “area” is the link between a model based on the abandonment of the academic function of transmitting knowledge, and the exaltation of a rhetorical jargon with pseudo-pedagogical overtones that delve into the achievement of this goal, such as the “flipped classroom”, self-learning by discovery, qualitative assessments, the primacy of emotional intelligence over cognitive one, competency-based learning, PBL, UDL, uncontrolled inclusion, the banishment of memory, free grade promotion and the deactivation of the teacher’s feature. All of this with the aim of preventing any objective and critical assessment of what the student has actually learned. Let us add to this that in Catalan educations systemic arbitrariness prevails as a consequence of the Decree on staff, the Decree on management and the Decree on centre autonomy. We will then agree that the resulting cocktail is enough to make one shudder.

“Learning: the treasure within” proclaimed Jacques Delors in the eponymous report (1996)… A loot for whose plundering many letters of marque have been granted to opaque interests represented by groups of all kinds and stripes. In Catalonia we have seen how many groups friendly to power have been elevated with authentic intellectual ignoramuses at the helm, who have ended up constituting themselves into a caste.

Let it be clear that we are not talking about putting areas as curricular units into practice and contrasting interdisciplinary aspects of the different branches of knowledge, because since teaching by areas begins in primary school, it is being overlooked that in order to understand the transversality between two or more scientific disciplines, one must know them as long as may have also previously been taught subjects, something that, unless starting with classical subjects in nursery school, it does not seems to be case. No, the Pythagorean theorem does not work with self-learning by discovery, at least not in the vast majority of mankind.

We tend to forget too often that educations is basically a directed process, which reproduces on an individual scale the historical progress of human knowledge updated: bringing order to chaos. Nor should we learn to add as the Romans did with their additive (and subtractive) numerical system, having as we do a much more operative positional one and without undermining the ultimate understanding implied in. Wonderfully, and just as example, this is the purpose of a well-known and controversial computer program for learning mathematics that is causing havoc in Catalonia.

In short, the implementation of the areas has been nothing other than the avoidance of deep learning and the elimination of the method that has proven most successful throughout history, at least since Plato’s Academy: the teacher/student binomial. If Euclid (4th and 3rd centuries BC), a former student of the Academy at the time, were to see how today we are teaching how to add “innovamatically” almost in the same way he did, while at the same time abandoning a much more operational way with a numerical system that he could not have known, he would fall dead in his grave again from the shock he would experience.

We are not in a situation of prior debate about the areas; we have seen the disastrous practical results of their application in primary school, we are seeing them in compulsory secondary school and soon we would have seen them in high school. Actually, there are already high schools that are applying them. But, once again, what is behind the areas?

At first glance, it would have been assumed that the model of grouping subjects by areas would have been properly contrasted, and its results compared with those of the classic model by subjects/subjects and direct teaching. But this was not the case because it suffers from a serious problem of ontological incompatibility with its counterpart. Results do not seem to be important: any contrast is rejected outright due to the denial of what is included in this notion. So, as long as any comparison seems to be out of order, and being areas just within self-referential parameters, the hole education system suported by curricular áreas seems to fall into the domain of pseudosciences. Thus, if the data prove that the academic level of students trained in areas is lower than that of those trained in subjects, what is denied is the analysis criterion itself: the content learned is not indicative of a student’s progress. Game over.

Applied to the areas in primary school and understood as the opposite of a preparatory stage, the transition to a secondary school not adjusted to areas becomes then traumatic; that is, a failure. What is then required is to extend áreas into secondary level. But then, it turns out that we have only delayed the traumatic experience, shifting it to the transition from compulsory education to post-compulsory one – high school or vocational training. In short, the fatal shock seems to be appearing once again further on as an inevitable ritual of transition. Would it be then the point to set the right time for this transition not being traumatic?

No, far from it. What the grouping by areas and the model in which it is embedded deny is, at best, the very idea of ​​transition, that is, the passage from childhood to adolescence, and from this to youth and maturity, mentally and formatively. Its model is the permanence in a kind of an endless mental childhood. We said at best; at worst, a crude scam. The result: a bonsai school progressively extended to… to what?

So, if after completing compulsory secondary education now organized on areas, one enters into vocational training, characterized by specialization for learning a profession, or into a baccalaureate that is to prepare for university, the gap between compulsory and post-compulsory education then seems to be of oceanic amplitude; the chronicle of a failure foretold.

In short, since it seems to be necessary to alleviate the content and demands of each subsequent educational stage so that the failure of the previous one remains concealed, then what we have is nothing but the struggle for the survival of an educational thought that can only survive extending  its shortcomings to de later educational stages. Something like legalizing counterfeit currency instead of putting  its manufacturer in jail: that’s what we know as pedagogism.

It may be true that applying areas to an already very weakened baccalaureate it would certanily have cushioning efects on students coming from compulsory secondary, but it would be irreversibly annulled as such a baccalaureate itself, and the shock would it then be transferred to the university, wich is the next and logical step. A university wich is not by the way living its best moments either. This is precisely the purpose in wich a famous Catalan educational guru, irrepressibly addicted to educational fraud, seems to be involved by now.

With the court ruling that outlaws the areas in high school, the trick to delay the problem by transferring it to the next educational stage, and the lies on which the current educational systeml has been based is cut short. And this should force us to rethink education in a debate open to contrast, based in evidences, criticism, reflexion and far from fanatism as it has been so far. The verdict is therefore welcome: it is offering us what may be the last opportunity to correct the educational drift before it irreversibly enters into a no return course.

For the moment, the advent of the pedagogical parousia will have to wait; wish it never comes back.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

Rights: Creative Commons