In his book Continuous Devaluation (Tusquets), the secondary school teacher Andreu Navarra takes the scalpel, cuts here and there and shows us, with that crudeness of the coroner who has seen too much, the viscera of the education system.

The girl's name was Marta , she was 14 years old and always went to sleep on the desk with the hood down . "He had fallen into the final nihilism: he did not deliver evaluable homework or participate in class." The tutor told the teacher that she was a great girl and that she approached her. He did it in the yard. Then he knew: that girl was looking for her mother's flat at night.

"The really shameful thing," he writes, "is that the educational issue is not treated as a cultural crisis, but as a confrontation between a theory of lefts and a theory of rights."

Olga R. Sanmartín chatted with the teacher in these pages. Andreu traced a heartbreaking panorama. A vital precariousness in a good part of the students, ridiculous reform plans, a pedagogical arsenal of Buenos Aires that enthrones technology and corners the Humanities, cases of absenteeism in nine-year-old children who prefer to stay at home with the Play , mothers who refuse to sign the notes of their children because they do not like them, teachers who recognize not knowing how to analyze a compound sentence , students who play football with a book like a ball.

And this ongoing devaluation of the school.

With some stories of hope in spite of everything.

The girl in the hood began dating the boy who fought most of the whole institute. Joaquin rapped in the middle of the classes, passed the subject Olympicly and left the exams blank. Then Andreu changed his strategy: he became interested in Joaquin's writings.

First he asked for a 10-page work on Lazarillo de Tormes . The boy handed him 30. Then he asked him by email to show him his poems. "I was writing a stream of rage and pain that sounded pretty good." He then recommended that he read Blas de Otero . He got to it. Finally, to approve the quarter, he commissioned a job on El Buscón de Quevedo .

Joaquín gave the professor a manuscript entitled Demonstration of why El Buscón de Quevedo is a chusta [shit, go]. "I put a remarkable, because in his writing showed a large dose of own criteria. And because you had to give some kind of signal to Joaquin: a sign that the system was not a wall for him ."

Today he coordinates poetry workshops for children in a library.

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