The Royal Spanish Academy has presented a report in which it warns of the deterioration in the teaching of Literature and the Spanish Language in Secondary and Baccalaureate Education. The study starts from a situation that, in the description of the RAE, is marked by the “objective deficiencies detected in young people” in the use of language, their impaired “expressive and argumentative capacity”both in the Spanish language and in the co-official languages of the State, the marginalization of classical languages, the difficulty for students to become interested in literature and the impact of legal changes and the current didactic model based on competencies rather than on the content.
The linguists Pedro Álvarez de Miranda, José Antonio Pascual, Ignacio Bosque and Salvador Gutiérrez, the writer and professor Carme Riera and the director of the RAE, Santiago Muñoz Machado, presented the report as members of the commission of academics that prepared the report, later approved by the plenary session of the RAE. Ignacio Bosque insisted that his study is based, above all, in the experience of teachers: The RAE has received reports from 15 teachers who are in the classrooms and represent their colleagues through professional associations.
What does the RAE report say? Above all, it detects a feeling of orphanhood among teachers in the face of a system that does not protect them. It is enough to do a tasting in its 55 pages. “There is little doubt that the most recent legislation will be replaced by a new one if a party other than the one that proposed it comes to government.” “There are few reflections on the causes that apparently make the promulgation of each new law necessary.” “Content-based teaching is sometimes caricatured by identifying content with the memorization of data. […] This simplification [es] interested.” “The teaching staff in Language and Literature He has expressed his confusion on many occasions. due to the fact that there is no teaching methodology aimed at programming, applying and evaluating the competency approach”.
There is more: “It is unfortunate, in our opinion, that pedagogical renewal courses and those related to the use of new technologies are much more frequent among us than those They focus on updating teaching subjects. Although exceptional, there have even been cases in which teachers were offered courses on coaching y mindfulnesswhen they would surely have needed to receive some training courses first.
The RAE study does not dismiss as a concept the so-called education in competencies, the doctrine that marks the Lomloe and that is aimed at achieving the autonomy of students in their relationship with knowledge. The RAE remembers that, very often, knowledge and skills are the same thing. But he denounces that the administrations have refused to marry these two purposes through rigorous reflection. And that the State, instead of transmitting to teachers an intellectual structure with which to give meaning to their work, has provided them with a succession of gadgets technological.