“Where there is education, there is no class distinction,” the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater once said, a maxim that applies to the recognition of the emergence and triumph of our public school for more than a century. This dogma also acted as a basis for the expansion of private schools, a growth that in recent decades has been accompanied by the problems that conflicts brought to families, not only union conflicts, which caused their children to lose days and hours of instruction, which affected their knowledge.
Since the late 1990s, Argentine schools have experienced positive changes in terms of increased enrollment, particularly in middle and elementary school, where enrollment has increased. Surely many of us will agree that secondary school is also the “Achilles heel” of the education system, considering the low completion rate in a reasonable time and the learning problems of students who complete the educational process at the primary level. But mainly, We cannot ignore that the quality of Argentine education has stagnated. This is shown by the assessment tests, including those comparing us with countries in the region, carried out by UNESCO’s Latin American Laboratory for the Assessment of the Quality of Education (Llece). Argentina needs to do something to improve its education, but that “something” needs to be endowed with the same nerve that has made our school an educational beacon for the world.
The education reform that the government presented days ago is ambitious and is based on the same path that Donald Trump tried to take in his first administration in the USA, namely to “smash” the education system –he made it without any luck- Because one thing is the decentralization of the administration of provincial or municipal systems, but with a common goal protected by the idea of belonging to the same nation-state, and another thing is free will, however dangerous and elitist it may be in the end.
The reform presented by the government is covered by a general standard called the “Freedom of Education Act”. A delicate criterion to hide an ultimate goal that would be to break with an integrated system at the national level and even attack provincial systems.
The proposal has positive aspects, B. the final year of middle school final exam, which can help students present themselves in the world of higher education and the formal job market. They did this in Brazil and Chile and it went very well. All of the suggestions in the chapter for strengthening educational evaluation are also positive.
But fundamentally, it also contains other controversial points that can be harmful, such as the point where it recognizes “pedagogical and curricular autonomy for all educational institutions in the country, both public and private.” In this sense, the initiative allows each institution to “define its institutional project, its teaching methods, its internal organization and its school calendar and to participate in the selection of teaching staff within national and judicial parameters”. First hint of it, at least do not match. The school is the organizer of the family schedule, timetables and days. It is often very complicated for school administrators to bring the parents of a grade group together in something as simple as an extracurricular activity. Let’s imagine what a problem it would be for an entire school to accommodate all parents in the calendar, timetable and curriculum. Especially for parents who work and have little time to take care of the management of the school, even more so when they also have to take care of the recruitment of the management teams, such as the director of each school, a method designed for charter schools, financed by demand and not by supply, with the participation of families on the administrative boards, where even there the logic of integration is not broken and the calendars are similar everywhere. For some families, it may be uncomfortable if one child attends a middle school with a specific calendar and schedule and his brother attends an elementary school with a different institutional organization. Something fundamental that is presented very poorly and anticipates problems instead of finding solutions for families.
The project also includes various options for financing educational supply and demand. Specifically, donations to families or students in the form of vouchers, bonuses, scholarships and other equivalent instruments are planned. The famous “vouchers”.
Furthermore, the national government seems to be entering into a huge contradiction: if the law is clearly aimed at freeing the national state from responsibility in education, especially funding, and leaving it in the hands of the provinces, why does it want to change the funding model from supply to demand if that will not be its problem? At least in the project’s articles it is clear that the point is not to take responsibility, but to take it off your shoulders. In addition, there are districts where half of the enrollment is served by private schools, for example in CABA, the suburbs, the capital Córdoba and Mendoza. Private companies there already receive supply subsidies from the federal states. If demand is also subsidized, this will lead to an unprecedented event where private education will be the only activity that receives a contribution from supply and demand. generate a privilege compared to the rest.
Perhaps the most innovative thing is the promotion of home schooling, Home education differs from virtual education or distance learning – as has been the case during the pandemic – because it shifts the focus from traditional institutions to families: they are the ones who decide how to teach, for how long, what materials to use, respecting the minimum content, and they must seek and adapt education to the interests of each boy or girl. Basically, it is private teachers or the parents themselves who educate their children. The bill does not set a minimum age for home schooling, nor does it specify whether artificial intelligence alone can be used to give children access to information and content. A point that attracts attention. Obviously, this article seems to be intended for developed societies with families with superior incomes. In Argentina, 60% of children live below the poverty line, and no working- or middle-class parent could afford to pay private tutors. It might work for some sectors, but it would still harm social integration due to the lack of interaction between social groups – that of students in a school with their peers. And also in a geographical sense: isolated in their homes, where they are only intended to interact online, it means the consolidation of a social inequality that arises in the distribution of social groups in certain physical or coexistence spaces. This particular initiative does not promote the integration of society by separating minority groups from it. And it is hard to imagine that in a society as polarized as ours, there may be boys and girls in the future who will not experience the idea of social integration because they are not exposed to it.
Promoting homeschooling will certainly bring with it problems such as social isolation and a lack of autonomy for children. and can influence the development of interpersonal skills and dealing with different perspectives: the pressure and exhaustion for parents who have to cover all educational roles; Difficulty accessing resources and specialists, and potential mental health problems if isolation is not managed well. And it will lead to more inequality if there are not enough economic resources.
It is always good to debate education, professionals have a great chance to express themselves, but above all society must also express its opinion. We are facing a very interesting educational project to read and exchange ideas, but too ambitious and in some aspects harmful to put into practice in a social and economic context. where the school and families need help and no longer have any obligationsleaving them to their fate.
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