{"id":36915,"date":"2026-10-02T08:44:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T06:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/educationalevidence.com\/?p=36915"},"modified":"2026-10-02T09:56:54","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T07:56:54","slug":"30-years-of-logse-or-don-avito-carrascals-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educationalevidence.com\/en\/30-years-of-logse-or-don-avito-carrascals-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"30 years of LOGSE, or Don Avito Carrascal’s experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Image created using AI<\/p>\n

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License Creative Commons <\/a><\/p>\n

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Felipe J. de Vicente Alguer\u00f3<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The Organic Law on the General Organisation of the Education System (LOGSE<\/strong>) was published in the BOE (Official State Gazette) on 4 October 1990<\/strong>. Its implementation was phased, however, and was not fully rolled out until the 1996\u201397 school year. That year, the old EGB (Basic General Education) and BUP (Unified Polyvalent Baccalaureate) were phased out. Pupils who that year would have been in the 7th year of EGB all moved into the first year of ESO (Compulsory Secondary Education). Everyone born in 1986 or later has followed the LOGSE curriculum. Thirty years have now passed since then.<\/p>\n

A few years earlier, in 1902, Miguel de Unamuno<\/strong> published a short novel entitled Love and Pedagogy<\/em>. It tells of the attempt by Don Avito Carrascal<\/strong>, a rationalist intellectual, to father a child and educate him according to the principles of modern pedagogy. His aim is to turn poor Apolodoro, his guinea pig of a son, into a genius.<\/p>\n

A reader familiar with the state of education in Spain cannot help but recognise Unamuno as one of the critics of what would eventually become a new Avito: the LOGSE. The aim was the same: to turn the Spanish education system into an experimental laboratory for producing millions of new \u201ccompetency geniuses\u201d: children and adolescents endowed with great powers of critical analysis of reality, imbued with feminist, anti-sexist, solidarity-minded, environmentalist and civic-minded values, free of gender prejudice, and naturist, internationalist, anti-racist and inclusive in outlook\u2014and whatever else Don Avito calls sociological pedagogy<\/em><\/strong>. But will they even know who Unamuno was?<\/p>\n

Don Avito entrusts the education of his son Apolodoro to a certain Fulgencio Entrambosmares, who, according to the author, professes a holy hatred, an odium philosophicum, of common sense. <\/em>Does this incompatibility between the LOGSE and common sense<\/strong> ring any bells? In this analogy, Don Avito is the LOGSE (or its authors), while Don Fulgencio represents the sanctimonious pedagogues who, over the years, have been the main transmission belt for imposing LOGSE-ism in classrooms, including the two major trade unions, UGT and CCOO<\/strong>, which greeted LOGSE with jubilation.<\/p>\n

Even so, Don Fulgencio realises how difficult Don Avito\u2019s experiment is and, in a moment of lucidity, refers to Don Avito\u2019s ideas, ideotas, ideitas, idezuelas, pseudo-ideas and ideodes<\/em><\/strong>\u2014all manner of fanciful variations on the word \u201cidea\u201d<\/em>\u2014but, despite everything, he continues to take charge of Apolodoro\u2019s education. Shall we take a look at the ideas, ideotas, ideitas, idezuelas, pseudo-ideas and ideodes<\/em> that LOGSE and the laws that followed it have brought us?<\/p>\n

We begin with the two great foundational ideas behind the so-called Reform: comprehensive schooling<\/strong> and constructivism. Comprehensive schooling is schooling without distinctions: all pupils, regardless of their abilities or interests, are in the same classroom, following the same curriculum up to the age of 16. The consequences of comprehensive schooling include automatic promotion, assessment by cycles rather than by school years, a two-year Bachillerato (upper secondary education), and no numerical grades\u2026<\/p>\n

Constructivism has its roots in Piaget<\/strong>, who used the term itself in some of his later writings. C\u00e9sar Coll<\/strong>, who was part of the Ministry of Education team working on LOGSE, summarised the concept of constructivism in these terms: the constructivist conception of learning and teaching holds that learning consists fundamentally in constructing meanings and making sense of what is learned, and in getting pupils to engage in this process of constructing meanings and making sense on the basis of their personal experience and the knowledge, feelings and attitudes with which they approach school content and activities<\/em>. Would Don Avito say anything different today?<\/p>\n

From these foundational ideas came a cascade of ideotas<\/em> that all teaching staff had to take on board (even if they did not fully understand them):<\/p>\n

Meaningful learning.<\/p>\n

Curriculum design: first, second and third levels of curriculum specification.<\/p>\n

Curriculum project.<\/p>\n

Classroom planning.<\/p>\n

And all this was followed by suffocating bureaucracy. And a whole host of careerists who made hay while the sun shone by preaching the new pedagogy in courses, workshops, documents and well-paid jobs in the many cosy little outfits that the education authorities created in LOGSE\u2019s shadow. All to turn Apolodoro – in other words, Spanish pupils – into the intended recipients of their pedagogical revolution.<\/p>\n

Just as we were beginning to get to grips with this cascade of new concepts, now compulsory currency in staff meetings, assessments and meetings of all kinds, the OECD<\/strong> appeared on the scene in 2002 and launched the so-called DESECO<\/strong> project (Definition and Selection of Competencies). In other words, all this verbiage laboriously absorbed in the early LOGSE years is already vintage<\/em>. Now the time has come for the so-called competencies<\/em>. This pedagogical approach can be summarised as follows:<\/p>\n