PISA, its official website informs “is the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment. PISA measures 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges.” Although the report for the 2022 tests shows that Spain has obtained the same results as in 2018 on the three skills tested, these have been much worse in Catalonia. The corresponding table published by El País on 5 December, shows that Catalan secondary school students are doing worse than the average OECD student and the average Spanish student, and only better than students in the autonomous regions of Castilla-La Mancha, Andalucía, the Canary Island, Ceuta and Melilla. To be specific they occupy the fourteenth position out of nineteen, quite a debacle.
Catalonia has fared much worse in mathematics (21 points less than in 2018), sciences (12 points lost) and reading comprehension (22). The Conselleria d’Educació (the Catalan ‘ministry’ for Education, which has full competences) initially reacted to these bad results by noting that immigrants students were overrepresented in the tests, an ugly piece of misinformation spouted by the Secretary of Educative Transformation, Ignasi Garcia Plata, that had to be rectified the following day. The article by Ignacio Zafra in El País which I have quoted, does mention among the causes for the debacle the presence of a 15’7% of immigrant students in the Catalan secondary school classrooms (ages 12 to 16), mostly of non-European origins (75’5%), that is to say, Sub-Saharan, Northern African, Middle-Eastern, Central and South-American, and Chinese.
Zafra also mentions the “politically delicate” question of the use of Catalan as the main language in primary and secondary education, following immersion policies established in the 1980s, now that this language has a residual presence in the social media and other online content the children consume, mostly offered in Spanish and English. As Zafra notes, children’s Catalan-language TV, which used to be a powerful tool to encourage the use of Catalan among native and non-native speakers, is now no longer massively watched as it was before the rise of social media, twenty years ago. Zafra also comments that Catalonia has done poorly in other tests, such as PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, run by the IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement), which measures the reading ability of primary school children.
Whatever is happening (the linguistic situation, the lesser attention that underprivileged students receive, the presence of immigrant students), it is clear that the Catalan Government is very much disoriented. The letter sent to all the families by Anna Simó, the Consellera d’Educació, is rather bland. It mentions the pandemic (which is no excuse since all countries have gone through it and Spain has managed to maintain its national indicators), vaguely appeals to the role of families in controlling access of children to digital devices and calls for the respect of diversity and the teachers’ task. It also announces the start of new policies to improve in mathematics, science, and reading, without naming any, wistfully calling for a renewed common effort. As Greta Thunberg would say ‘blah, blah, blah’.
Ask any Catalan teacher in public schools (I assume private schools are another matter) and they all mention the same problems: a too high student-teacher ratio, an unrealistic approach to the linguistic environment of students, an unwanted interference from pedagogues backed by politicians seeking votes rather than improving education. And, let’s finally name it, the impact of social media, possibly much worsened by the time of isolation during Covid (which, if you ask me, could have been a chance to get children used to studying and reading; many literary careers started in childhood when bed-ridden kids used their time to read massively).
All this happened between 5-8 December, while another conversation was unfolding in the background. In September the Conselleria and the Consell Escolar de Catalunya started asking schools about their regulations concerning the use of cell phones. In early November there was a spate of news about the results of the survey: 53% of the schools were already regulating their use, with 23% forbidding the use of cell phones in the classroom. The Conselleria decided then that it was up to each centre to implement its own regulations, following directives to be issued in early 2024 and after debating the matter with the families.
In late October a group of parents from Barcelona started a rather popular movement to ask the schools to completely ban the use of cellphones in the classroom, an initiative started using… Whatsapp groups. As diverse Twitter users commented, perhaps these families should begin by delaying the purchase of cell phones until their children are 16, an idea that, controversial as it is, has started to gain traction in the last two weeks. The Consell Escolar has asked to totally ban cell phones from primary school and regulate them in secondary school. Parents, teachers, and schools, in any case, are asking the Conselleria to assume the responsibility and regulate the use of cell phones for all schools in Catalonia, which makes perfect sense.
Both problems, the poor PISA results and the use of cell phones are clearly connected, as it is very easy to see. Cell phones (or tablets and laptops) per se are not a problem, what is problematic is their misuse. The debate connects in many ways with the much older debate on how much television children should watch, with the difference that portable digital devices have made entertainment (in which I include social media) also portable. In the times when TV was used by many parents as a nanny, kids would spent as much time before the TV screen and they spend today glued to other screens, let’s not be hypocritical about it. The problem, then, is not the technology itself, which can always be used for positive educational purposes, but its power to distract children from what should be a main aim in their life. Watching too much inane TV, by which I mean more than one hour a day or two at most, took up precious time off homework and, perhaps even more importantly, play time at home or in public spaces with other kids. The PC (tablet, laptop…) first and the cell phone next have multiplied that problem by making entertainment ubiquitous and even colonizing the classroom to divert children’s attention away from education.
I am not against the presence of cell phones in my classroom or any other, but against their use for entertainment, a problem I extend to laptops and tablets. One thing is asking students to find a resource online to be used as part of the lecture/session and quite another to have students checking Whatsapp, Instagram, Twitter or the social media they prefer as they are being taught. I assume that no teacher checks their social media, shops online, or watches porn as they teach, and I would expect the same attitude from students. In my own case I used never to carry my cell phone to class, but my university requires a system of online authentication to access the classroom computers that forces us to use it. Even if I put my silenced cell phone immediately in my bag, I know it’s there and it bothers me very much. Its simple presence affects my concentration.
I am not a mother, but if I were, I would buy my child a basic phone if necessary by the time the child started moving about on their own, and I would ask the school to keep that phone in a locker throughout the day. Social media are extremely harmful to children and they should not use them until, at least, they are 16, which is when the first smartphone could be acquired, at the onset of secondary school, always being careful to monitor what children can access through their tablets, laptops and PCs. There are firewalls for that purpose. Cell phones, tablets or laptops should only be used in class in secondary school or university and always for educational purposes. Teachers need to have clear-cut rules for that, rather than be forced to police their own students. This is a problem already extended to university, as we cannot know what our students’ laptop screen are showing as we lecture, though scrolling through a cell phone is not a sight we should see in class.
The three disciplines or skills (mathematics, science, reading comprehension) are more or less suffering the same decline in all the countries, particularly those in trouble, but there are 10 countries that have done very well and that have little in common (except, of course, not being poor, with variations). Here they are: Singapore, Macau, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Estonia, Canada, Ireland, and Switzerland. Singapore takes the top spot, scoring 560 points, almost 100 above the average OEDC score. The Asian educational systems that head the ranking are, as we know, extremely demanding, part of a different culture with different views of competition in school, which are not applicable in Spain, or for that matter Catalonia. In fact, I would say that few foreign innovations work in other countries, otherwise we would all be copying Finland (or maybe Canada).
The declining performance of Catalan children also corresponds, I think, to the declining cultural standards of the nation, too engrossed in political matters (and tourism) to really care for creativity, and with parents and grandparents too fond of their own cell phones and social media. This is not specific to Catalonia, but we happen to be paying attention. In fact, average OECD performance has been falling steadily in the last decade, which indicates that the problem has nothing to do with the Covid-19 pandemic but with other factors. I believe that the decline begins with the consolidation of social media. The concept web 2.0 was popularized in 2004, the year Facebook was launched, and less than a decade later, the distraction which the social media suppose from consuming culture (at all levels) became visible in the OECD results. Again, the social media need not be the nefarious tool for hatred and humiliation they are; they could have been a formidable tool to fight stupidity and ignorance, but they were designed to appeal to the maximum common denominator, and that is not curiosity for knowledge. So, there we are, losing the project of universal education established in the Enlightenment to the interests of tech billionaires and the need for triviality of most social media users and content providers. The problem, I insist, is not the gadget but the content to which it gives children access. If cell phones were increasing the general performance of students, as they certainly could, they would not be a problem and we would not be having this conversation. Unless, that is, they know something in Singapore about how to balance education and entertainment in the times of social media which we don’t know. Let’s ask them.