The document entitled ´National Curriculum Framework´, launched by ANEP as the axis of the official project called ´Educational Transformation´, was analyzed by the educator Pablo Martinis in Nothing to Lose of M24. “‘Education is especially important to strengthen the skills and increase the productivity of the current generation,'” reads the official text “in line with what the World Bank says” about Education, he warned.
Martinis evaluated that “when one looks at the approach, the general spirit of the proposal, one finds that it is very focused on the individual character of the student; This has to do with emphasizing the question of learning, not so much of teaching, because what we can manage from the side of the one who teaches is teaching; of course you have to know how the student learns; now, when my emphasis is exclusively on the ways in which the student learns and on a series of competencies that are very marked by the individual constitution of the subject, one says ´well, at least that risk is present´; I think it’s present.”
Then he focused the criticism: “it is not that this necessarily has to go this way; now, if one looks globally at what the reforms have been that have centered the issue on ‘skills’, on this type of approach, that ‘here comes the modern, innovative, transformative proposal, which is going to leave behind what is backward, the archaic’, one generally finds that there is a very strong concern for insertion in the labor market”.
“And this must be put in context; An element that colleagues Stefanía Conde and Cecilia Sánchez drew attention to in the work they did is the more general context in which this document is inserted; and it is difficult to avoid this, it is not that one wants to install readings about supposed plots or whatever: now, when a fundamental actor in the promotion of this process is the World Bank (WB), one necessarily has to pay attention; because there are practically some loans from the World Bank in the line of Educational Transformation that are practically equivalent to the decrease in the educational budget of ANEP in 2020 and 2021, which is about 80 million dollars, ”she reported.
“Colleagues bring an extract from this document that really, if one puts the National Curriculum Framework proposal in line with what the WB says, leaves at least something to think about” and as an example, the ANEP text states that “’education is especially important to strengthen the skills and increase the productivity of the current generation; Uruguay needs to focus not only on the coverage and quality of education but also on its relevance, moving away from the traditional rigid and encyclopedic curriculum and towards a model that prepares all students for a rapidly changing labor market; taking advantage of this opportunity requires accumulating sufficient human and physical capital to increase productivity in a sustainable way in the medium and long term´; then, if one puts it in this framework, one finds a staging again of the theory of human capital”, warned Martinis.
He continued substantiating other substantive questioning of the underlying pedagogical and social conceptions behind the ANEP document, and pointed out that “in the ruling coalition we have sectors that are very concerned that the State, Education, gets into the subjectivity of children: they are concerned sex education, a whole series of components linked to what they call ‘gender ideology’; here is a proposal (that of ANEP) that messes a lot with subjectivity, from another perspective, that is adaptive, but that also deserves to be discussed”, he claimed.
He indicated “another problem” inherent in the concept that “‘Education has to prepare for the future’, which is very much in the spirit of this document: the only way in which Education can prepare for the future is by linking us with the past, because it is from there that one can relaunch forward; when we tend to begin to empty the centrality of these contents that allow us to insert ourselves in a history, in a culture, in some values, and we begin to worry too much about very instrumental knowledge -and there is something of this in the idea of ´competencies ´-, we impoverish the access to that cultural pattern; and what happens? Those who have situations of greater vulnerability, greater inequality, carry less baggage of all this when they access Education, and Education must provide it to them; those who come from other situations and contexts carry other baggage that already come with what Bourdieu called their ´cultural capital´”.
“Then, if Education does not provide this cultural capital, and we are going to tell a guri, a gurisa, a student, ´look, we are going to prepare you for the future,´ we are going to leave you in a situation of great inequality with those who are registered or affiliated in a cultural tradition, we leave it very much left to its own fate; and this centering of the proposal on the individual is a path that leaves him very much left to his own fate; Because how can we talk about metacognition, about being responsible for my own learning, if I can’t inscribe myself in a culture? (…) The consequence of leaving the subject free to his own possibilities is the deepening of social inequalities, which is precisely what an educational system has to go against, ”reflected the educator.
Regarding another chapter on the topic of Education in our country, the one that refers to the accusations by pro-government parliamentarians against Fenapes leaders of allegedly committing irregular and even criminal acts, the interviewee lamented that “I see a treatment of teachers and organized teachers based on fundamentally in the idea of suspicion, the suspicion about the crystallinity of his performance; that it has to do with the fact that we have several ongoing investigations, we have teachers separated from their positions; (…) The title of the Parliamentary Commission (…) catches my attention, it says that she is an investigator with the task of investigating ´the extension and justification of irregular licenses´ to the members of Fenapes; But she is going to study irregular licenses! In other words, is it already defined that they are irregular, a priori? But isn’t it an object of the Commission to establish whether they are irregular? So this is already defined in advance”.