The

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)

points out

Spain

as one of the countries where the reading comprehension of students is least developed when they finish compulsory education. Therefore ,

it has followed the performance of those born in

1984

, generating the

Logse

, comparing the achievements obtained when they were

15 years

(measured in the report

PISA

in

2000

) with the skills achieved when they turned

27

years old (evaluated in

2012

in the

PIAAC

study

).

The result is exactly the same: they scored 263 points when they were teenagers and they reached 263 points when they became adults.

It is one of the main conclusions of the

Skills Outlook 2021

report

, which this international organization has presented this Tuesday in some thirty countries.

The work analyzes lifelong learning and the transition from Secondary to the job market.

Spain is not doing very well here: while in almost all countries young people increase their ability to understand written texts as they come of age, here it is as if they stopped learning when they finished 4th of ESO.

The researcher

Francesca Borgonovi

, author of the research and member of the OECD Center for Skills, points out to EL MUNDO that "the estimated results in reading comprehension, on average, for the cohort of Spaniards who were born in 1984-1985 both at their 15 years and 26-28 years do not differ ".

In contrast, the OECD average shows an increase of

14

points in PIAAC, equivalent to

30%

of the standard deviation. The countries with the highest increase in skills are

Japan

(from 277 to 310 points),

Finland

(from 280 to 307) or

Sweden

(274 to 292). Spain is the only country where the improvement is equal to zero. In

Greece

(from 254 to 251) and

Ireland

(279 to 276) there is a worsening.

The circumstance of the cohort analyzed by the OECD is the one studied with the Logse, approved by the

PSOE

in

1990

. This law, whose main postulates will now be reproduced with Isabel Celaá's Lomloe, opted for the memorization of less content and promoted the so-called "learning to learn." Many place in this law the beginning of a drop in level.

"The Logse was enacted with the aim of modernizing education and allowing the decentralization of the educational model. The theorists of the model,

Álvaro Marchesi

and

César Coll

, proposed a constructivist model, where the student is the one who orders their learning and the teacher is the that it has to provide the means for the student to advance at their own pace, "says

Jorge Sainz

, Professor of Economics at the Rey Juan Carlos University and former Secretary General of Universities during the PP Government.

In his opinion, "the PISA data have shown the poor results of the model, which, even so, has continued to be the basis for subsequent reforms, such as the LOE and the Lomloe, curiously also inspired by César Coll". "The OECD data", he stresses, "show that the law, which had among its objectives the 'acquisition of intellectual habits', has been ineffective and has not succeeded in favoring those students from more economically or culturally disadvantaged backgrounds" .

The OECD does not want to go into assessing whether the stagnation is caused by the Logse and associates it rather with early abandonment and the high percentage of

NEETs

.

"We have to study the case more in depth, but our analyzes show that the increase in performance is lower in countries where the number of young people who neither study nor work is high, such as Spain," says Borgonovi, who points out that the children of parents who have gone to university obtain better reading comprehension results at 27 years of age than at 15.

Inequality

This is showing a problem of inequality because, at the same time, the children of parents without studies lose skills between the ages of 15 and 27.

Something similar happens with the educational level of these students: while the brightest improve their skills in that time, the furthest behind is not that they are stagnant, it is that they worsen.

Ismael Sanz

, professor of Applied Economics at the Rey Juan Carlos University and former

chair

of the Strategic Development Group of PISA of the OECD, explains that what the data says, in practical terms, is that "students who in 2000, when they were 15 Years, they did not understand

Don Quixote

or they did not know how to read an electricity bill or understand the prospect of a medicine, they went back in 2012, when they were 27 years old. "

In his opinion, "the problem does not only come from secondary school, but it does not improve much at university either."

He cites other data from PIAAC that show that the level of a Spanish higher education student is the same as that of a high school student in the Netherlands or Japan.

"Children trophy"

"I have been noticing for years that people enter the University with good grades but who do not know how to read critically", warns

Benito Arruñada

, professor of Business Organization at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. "My perception is that they read less and worse every time. We have a low majority and a highly motivated minority. The exams are getting shorter and less material enters. When you talk to companies they tell you that they hire students with very good grades but that, in the job interview, the first thing they do is ask about the conciliation, "he adds.

Arruñada argues that this generation is that of the "trophy children."

"They have been given medals even if they lost. The best students have won all kinds of prizes and have not received a criticism in their life. When you correct a presentation in class they immediately get angry. And then, at work, when they drop one. They get angry, they immediately go to cry in the bathroom or complain to the boss that they have a mania. They cannot assume that they have done it wrong. "

"It is crucial that this does not happen again"

The report also points out that Spain had "high levels" of participation in formal and informal training before the Covid, but, compared to other countries, it has been fortunate to have schools closed fewer days and the loss of learning has been less.

However, during the 2009 economic crisis, "the percentage of young people who neither study nor work increased."

"It is crucial that it does not happen again," warns Francesca Borgonovi.

Spain has 17% of

NEETs

, but in the hardest years of the crisis it has reached 25%.

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