School in Europe | Targets and Measures

Introduction and Table of Contents

2099-02-06T10:57:00.000Z

This site is a partial translation into English of the original site in Portuguese, "Educação em Portugal, Metas e Medidas". Talking to our foreign colleagues, we found that the school systems of at least several more European countries, such as Spain, Italy and France, suffer with the same symptoms as the Portuguese school system, therefore, a wider European discussion of these issues is well justified.

Note that the reader comments are only allowed at the pages of the respective Chapters, but not at this title page.

Table of contents

Conceptual Errors of the Liberalized School System

2008-10-18T09:27:00.021+01:00

The successive reforms that "liberalized" the school education 30 years ago are implicitly based in a number of false notions of the intellectual development of a child, on the mechanisms of cerebral activity, memory, thinking, motivation and learning. These gross errors eviscerated the educative process, converting it into a useless waste of time for a great majority of at least 80% of all pupils.

The concept of possibility of arbitrarily accelerated intellectual development of a child

The insistence of the reformed school to develop Critical, Creative and Independent Thinking (CC&IT), starting from the 1^st year of the primary school, implies the assumption that it is possible to develop CC&IT in average children of 6 to 9 years of age. This is false, as we all know from our personal experience that CC&IT appears in fact in puberty, and not before that. Clearly this makes every sense from the biological point of view, as only at such age a human being becomes physically capable of constituting his/her own family. In fact, and contrary to the concept of the intellectual development of a child, adopted implicitly at School, the children of 6 to 9 years have perfectly developed capacities of memorization and imitation (M&I) instead, which also makes perfect sense biologically – at this age, a child will have difficulty in surviving alone, needing all the possible help, which includes all the information transmitted by the surrounding adults, consciously or unconsciously.

Therefore, by insisting to use and further develop in these children the capacities of CC&IT instead of capacities of M&I, the educator tries to perform a fait impossible – to use capacities that are physically absent, in a vast majority of cases. The reaction of a class may actually demonstrate some indications of the presence of CC&IT, although in fact the children are only doing what they know how to, and what are well capable of: imitating the adult (teacher), searching and interpreting keys and hints, given by the teacher, explicitly or implicitly, consciously or unconsciously. Thus, they do something similar to a circus trick of a magician, who can find a coin in a room full of people, taking clues from the behaviour of these same people, although not reading their mind as he claims he does. The desired result is achieved both in the classroom and in the circus, although by ways completely different from the alleged ones.

This conceptual error has fatal consequences in studies of every discipline in the curricula of primary and secondary school, and in the first place, of disciplines that require the use of abstract thinking, such as Mathematics or Philosophy.

The intellectual capacities of a pupil are developing in a natural rhythm, each one at its proper time, and can not be created arbitrarily at any time, idealized by our sheer will, in absence of physiologically essential conditions. We should not waste the time and effort of the pupil and the teacher uselessly, trying to achieve the impossible.

The concept of learning without memorization or memory training

The reformed School had got rid of all of the memorization exercises in all of the textbooks of the school curriculum, of every year of study and in every discipline. This has been done in order to develop CC&IT in a pupil, without constraints or restrictions imposed by any memorized knowledge. Apart from the impossibility, already discussed, to obtain the required CC&IT in young children, this decision has even more serious consequences, destroying the entire track of intellectual development of an average pupil.

Firstly, the lack of memory development exercises fatally damages the normal development of systematized long-term memorization capacities in an average pupil, which do not develop without such exercises. In the same way as a sportsman can’t obtain good results without arduous and prolonged training, pupils are unable to develop their capacities without hard intellectual work, such as required, for instance, when facing a challenge to learn a poem by heart.

As a consequence, without a properly developed capacity for long-term associative memorization, average pupils have to study from scratch for every test, as they remember nothing of what they have been taught previously, and can’t use any such previous knowledge. Such pupils are unable to relate and conjugate different pieces of knowledge, because they just have none of that knowledge in their heads.

On the other hand, there exists knowledge that has to be learned by heart, or else it loses any usefulness, for instance, because it can’t be deduced neither from our daily experience nor the information available for solving the respective problem. One of such cases, namely, that of tsunami in Indonesia, will be discussed in another chapter. The lack of memorized knowledge fatally impairs the studies of disciplines that require abstract thinking and are based on definitions, leading to generalized failure of pupils in Mathematics, the language of all Sciences.

Therefore, typical pupils are completely crippled in disciplines that require some abstract thinking, such as Mathematics or Philosophy, and consequently badly impaired in Sciences. These disciplines are based on definitions, which have to be memorized, otherwise pupils can not understand, for example, what is written on a page of mathematical formulas, as they can’t even remember the priority rules of arithmetic operations. In this particular case, as in many others, the rules have to be memorized, and there is no other way to achieve the desired results.

In this context, the insistence of the School to teach without memorizing, but relying only on the pupils’ capacity to learn to deduce the knowledge that they may need seems absurd and deprived of good sense – once again, we can’t expect humanly impossible things to happen by recurring miracle.

Concept of thinking based on images

The attempts of our School to teach to read using the visual (global) method are implicitly based on the notion that human beings build their thinking on a visual image of the word, instead of the image of the respective sound, and thus better memorize visual images, rather than sonic images. To understand the folly of this notion, we should recall that during the larger part of its course of tens of thousands of years the development of human civilization was based on oral communication, whereas written communication only appeared 5 or 6 thousand years ago, and thus hardly had enough time to significantly affect the evolution of the human brain. Thus, during tens of thousands of years all the existing knowledge had been transmitted orally, from one generation to another, and memorized in the form of the sonic images of words, but not in the form of their visual image, as writing had been unknown at that time. The same still happens in primitive tribes and some animal species, with the pre-language evolution adding a still longer period of brain adaptation to sonic communication.

Although every concrete notion may be memorized in the form of an image of the respective object, the more abstract notions can hardly be represented in the brain in this manner, due to the absence of the respective images. Apart from this, the number of concrete objects which we encounter in our daily life is much inferior to the number of different words, which may correspond to such objects (nouns) or to the respective actions (verbs), as there are many different grammatical forms for each word.

Indeed, in ideographic Chinese and Japanese writings we must note both the limited number of images, always associated to the respective syllables and sounds, which a pupil needs to study and know (about 1000 at the secondary school level), and a significantly larger effort demanded from the respective pupils, as compared to the Occidental pupils, showing larger costs of image memorization as compared to sound memorization. This cost comparison could be interpreted in terms of the information contents of the respective information units.

Thus, we see that the capacity to process sounds and use their mental images in thinking has arisen earlier in our history, and is more and better developed in our brain, requiring much lesser effort than the capacity to process images.

As a consequence of teaching to read by the visual (global) method, the pupils only learn to visually recognize a very limited number of words, never learning to read new unknown words, as they can’t build syllables from letters, or words from syllables. It is easy to verify the existence of this calamity by way of a simple reading test, using text with unknown words – for example, in a foreign language, naturally, using the same alphabet. Such pupils are usually unable to understand what they are reading, jumping over the unknown words, incapable of reading them and discovering their significance. The visual (global) method is the major reason of the generalized scholar failure in Portuguese, compounding the learning difficulties in all the other disciplines across the scholar curriculum.

The concept of learning without effort or stress

The School wagers on learning without effort or serious work, avoiding any stress to the pupils. In order to avoid stress at all cost, the disciplined behaviour is not imposed in the classroom, and it is not necessary to learn anything at all but heart, with the lessons reduced mostly to games and discussions.

Although pupils have natural curiosity, they also have laziness inherent to any live being, which tries to avoid effort, if at all possible. The school should direct this curiosity to the learning process, stimulating the pupil to learn, to memorise and to think. On the other hand, the pupils, whose intellectual capacities are already underdeveloped, by the action of the entire collection of the conceptual errors that we are discussing, avoid at all cost any intellectual effort, extremely distressing for them, preferring to execute tasks that require no such effort, or else find occupations foreign to the process of learning, both in the classroom and at home.

Physiologically, stress is an even stronger motivation for learning than curiosity. Stressed and disturbed, the live being tries to learn the ways to avoid being bothered in the future. Therefore, eliminating from the learning process all the factors that may trouble the pupils in some way, such as strict order in the classroom, exigency towards the pupils both in the classroom and at home, necessity to know (know by heart, or else know perfectly at any time of day or night) anything at all, the School creates learning difficulties for a great majority of pupils, which do not have their learning motivations properly conditioned by family or society.

The concept of teaching and learning by mutual aid of the pupils

The group tasks, which teachers use very frequently, as such tasks allow to improve evaluation of genuinely weak pupils without any effort or hard work by the same pupils and allow the teacher to avoid evaluating the real knowledge of each pupil, are based on the idea that weak pupils can learn from the better pupils, when they are doing something together.

This concept has been implemented in several European countries, starting from the beginning of the last century, with no success, as it was quickly dropped due to undesirable counter-productive effects. Namely, instead of motivating the weaker pupils to learn, it causes the better pupils to loose their motivation, as the weaker pupils would typically leave all the work (see the previous point, on the natural laziness) for the better pupils. The better pupils have to work much more, receiving an evaluation below their expectations, due to the reasons that may include the lack of participation of their weaker colleagues, subjective evaluation of the capacities of their working group by the teacher, who knows that the weaker pupils would never be able to do the task on their own, and the complexity of the relations with the rest of the class, consisting predominantly of the weaker pupils, which, however, are trying to affirm themselves among their peers.

The usage of this concept at School results in the subversion of the educative process, destroying its moral foundations, as it allows the teachers to approve pupils who have no knowledge, on one side, and on the other side degrades the evaluation of the strongest pupils.

Measures proposed

Reinstate the scientific validity of the curricula and teaching methods used at School, as we discuss in the other chapters:

Portuguese: Teach to Read Using the Phonetic (Synthetic) Method

2008-02-06T20:21:00.000Z

Usually it is assumed that the insufficiencies of the Portuguese system of school education may be resolved already tomorrow, provided today we manage to take the "correct" action. The reality is that these insufficiencies result from 30 years of the irresponsible experiments conducted in this country. There experiments have created fundamental problems, which will require many years to be resolved. This Chapter is devoted to one of the most urgent of these problems: how do we teach to read in the Primary School (1st Cycle of the Basic Education).

Evaluation of the Basic and Secondary School

We shall evaluate the school system in terms of the key competences acquired by the pupils. We shall stress one of the most important of these competences – to be able to read, understand and interpret a written text. At the National Exams in Portuguese of the 12th (final) year, out of the total of 200 points, 80 are given for the interpretation of a written text. As everyone (of the Portuguese readers) knows, the average grade at these Exams is around 7 (the Portuguese grading scale runs from 0 to 20, 10 being the lowest "pass" grade). Thus, we conclude that on average the pupils who take the National Exam in Portuguese have acquired the respective key competence at only the 30% level, as a pupil who is excellent in this competence would never fail completely in the rest of the Exam. Therefore, average pupils at the end of their 12th year at school even fail to achieve the level expected of excellent primary school pupils.

Indeed, even between the students who enter into the university system, there are a lot who fail in the same key competence, to be able to read, understand and interpret a written text, which does not surprise us too much, as some of these students have their average school grade below 10.

Therefore, our evaluation of the Teaching of Reading and Portuguese Language in Portugal is "Bad" (Fail).

Teaching to Read

In Portugal they teach to read using the so-called visual (or global) method: the pupils are taught to recognise entire words by their visual appearance. This method was first proposed by a U.S. educator, being radically different from the phonetic (or synthetic) method: learn the letters – build syllables – words – phrases. In fact, the educator was quite successful in appropriately combining the two methods, as his pupils learned to read easier and quicker. However, the usage of his ideas in the Portuguese school system elevates the visual component to the absolute.

As a consequence, in a large majority of cases the pupils are taught to read using the official global method, with disastrous results: they don't learn to read when they should, failing to read even in their 4th year of school (the last year of the Primary, or of the 1st Cycle of the Basic School). Most unfortunately, there are countless examples demonstrating that this is a rule and not some isolated cases only.

The visual (global) method of teaching to read

The nations who have the visual method as the only way to teach reading are the Far Eastern nations, who use ideograms for writing. The ideograms are simplified drawings, each of which represents a word, all ideograms being different one from the other, although some of the concepts are constructed using more than one ideogram. A well-educated Japanese high-school graduate knows about one thousand ideograms. This translates into about one hundred ideograms per school year, or two ideograms per week, which does not look too much. Nevertheless, a Japanese pupil, to be successful at school, has to study many more hours per day as compared to a Western pupil.

Thus, Portuguese pupils have to recognise the words by their visual appearance, without knowing letters or syllables. Looking at the pages full of text, they quickly loose any confidence in their own abilities, as every day they are required to learn ever more words, at a pace that by far exceeds the two ideograms per week required of a Japanese pupil. However, whereas the Japanese pupils know they need to work real hard, the Portuguese pupils have no such notion, as they are never required to work seriously at school during the classes. Having lost their hopes, the pupils give up and don't learn to read when they should, with disastrous consequences for their entire school life, and serious consequences for the rest of their lives.

The difficulties of the visual method for an average pupil may be easier understood if we think of the information processing in our brain. Indeed, a great majority of persons is able to reason based on the notions expressed by words, which are build of sounds or phonemes. Therefore, the phonetic (synthetic) method is naturally applicable to teaching to read. On the other hand, only the most gifted painters or architects are able to reason based on images. Everyone knows the difficulty of learning to recognise all the traffic signs, although these are much less numerous than the Japanese ideograms, and were designed to be easily comprehensible. It is true that the persons who are able to read very quickly use the visual method for this purpose. However, such persons are relatively few, and usually acquire this ability after they have learned to read very well, using the conventional phonetic method.

Thus, we must not complicate uselessly the life of a great majority of our pupils, trying to impose them the visual (global) method in the primary school.

Diagnosis

Our Primary School pupils (1st Cycle of the Basic School) are unable to learn to read when they should, because they are mostly taught to read by the visual (global) method, which does not work and can not possibly work, with the results of this pedagogic folly easily noticeable in the National System of Education.

We must note that there are no incompetent teachers or bad pupils in the primary school, instead, there are incorrect teaching methods imposed by incompetent Ministries.

Targets

The pupils should learn to read by the end of the 2nd year, that is, at 7 to 8 years of age, fluently, at about 100 words per minute. It would be to much to ask for the same targets to be achieved by the end of the 1st year, as the pupils are already overloaded with all the new things they need to get in touch with and learn. The first year should be dedicated to the integration in the class, and learning disciplined behaviour during the classes, learning safety rules, study visits to where the parents work, to historic places, the earlier the better. We may start to study the alphabet and the numbers, building syllables and learning sums up to 20; however, we should avoid the temptation to teach everything in the first year, if we don't want the pupils, overloaded, to get disappointed and disillusioned already in the first year of their school life.

Measures

The visual method must be substituted by the synthetic method, the textbooks of Reading for the primary school must be conveniently republished to be used for the synthetic method, already for the next school year, as every year lost represents one more generation of our pupils, victims of the system of educations. The teaching of English should not begin before the 3rd year, in order to let the pupils learn to read fluently in Portuguese first. Otherwise, the pupils will be overloaded during their 2nd year, and will fail to learn to read, let alone learning English.

Notes Added in Proof

The French Ministry of Education has prohibited the visual (global) method already in 2006.
In November of 2007 a piece of news appeared on BBC detailing the plans for the British children to be taught to read, already at the age of 6, using the synthetic (phonetic) method.
Rhetoric question: when will the other EU countries follow?

Mathematics: Teach to Memorise

2008-02-05T22:23:00.000Z

The irresponsible experiments on the national system of education of the last 30 years have created a set of fundamental problems in the Portuguese school system, which may only be solved in the medium and long perspective. The most important of these is the absolutization of thinking and creativity, to the detriment of memorization and memory development, during the entire school experience of the pupil. This is the topic of this Chapter.

Memorize – what for?

The promoters of the above-mentioned educative experiments would categorically insist that there is no knowledge that must be memorized or learned by heart, that it is sufficient to understand how the things work, and after that the pupil can think logically to deduce any missing pieces. Let us remind the TV interview shown shortly after the tsunami in Indonesia, featuring a British girl who memorized at school and quickly recalled the symptoms of a tsunami coming, promptly communicating her logical conclusions to her parents, as a result, not only she herself and her family survived the tsunami, but also all the other guests staying at the same hotel. At the same time, there were thousands of other people present at the beaches, who had no memorized knowledge of tsunami, in absence of which their creative and independent thinking turned out to be completely useless in saving their own lives.

We therefore conclude that the two components, memorization and creative thinking, must be developed in harmony, as in order to be able to use the knowledge already accumulated by humanity we have to resort to memorization, on the other hand, the memorized knowledge is also needed as a base for new knowledge, to be created by our own creative and independent thinking.

Assessment

We need a criterion to assess the memorization capacity of our pupils. Well, Mathematics is a subject fundamental for all the exact knowledge that can be expressed numerically, including Science and Technology. Mathematics deals with abstract objects, non-existent in Nature in their pure form, first defining them, and then studying their properties, for future practical usage. The simplest example of such objects are natural numbers, as for example, 17. Thus, to start using Mathematics, one needs to know – that is, needs to memorize – the respective definitions of the objects which we are working with. Indeed, without knowing the definitions and the properties of the arithmetic operations, studied in the primary school, we shall make little use of sines and cosines – for which we must also know the definitions, in order to give practical usage to the respective formulas. Thus, the memorization ability is indispensable for Mathematics, equally, a pupil with good systematic memorization ability will not fail in Mathematics.

Thus, we shall use the results of the National Exams in Mathematics to assess the systematic memorization capacity of our pupils. The average grades of these exams are usually around 6 or 7 (note for the non-Portuguese reader: the grading scale used runs from 0 to 20, 10 being the minimum positive grade). Thus, an average pupil, who managed to arrive to the final phase of his school learning experience, has hardly mastered 1/3 of the competences in Mathematics he should have acquired. However, the lack of competences in Mathematics implies, first and foremost, the very serious problems with the memorization ability, which should have been developed at School, by way of constant, systematic and persistent memory-developing exercises. Without exercise, the memorization ability degrades, in the same way as any other unused human ability: the patients who stay in bed for a long time forget how to walk.

Thus, we give a "Bad" (Fail) grade to our pupils for their systematic memorization ability.

Symptoms

The lack of systematic memorization ability reveals fatal in teaching of Mathematics, and equally in teaching of all the other subjects that require the capacity of abstract thinking, the development of which primarily depends on Mathematics. Among such high-failure subjects we shall note Physics, which no-one likes, as it has a lot of abstract fundamental notions, such as "the material point". Other subjects, such as Psychology, depend mostly on the day-to-day experiences, and thus are well-loved by the pupils.

Many pupils "study for the tests", resorting to indiscriminate memorization, to try to avoid scholar failure. They learn by heart entire book pages of the subject matter that will appear in the test, without understanding any of it, subsequently copying from the memory onto the test paper, expecting to include something relevant into their replies. Regrettably, such type of memorization ability lends no help to the pupils: they are unable to use such indiscriminate knowledge on future occasions, studying from zero for each test, as he lacks systematically memorized knowledge. Such pupils are unable to establish any relation of the matter they are currently studying with what they have already learned in the other subjects, or in the previous years of study.

A very frequent excuse that such pupils provide is "I don't remember any of this; we studied it a long time ago, already in the primary school", clearly revealing the most severe and extremely common deficiencies in the systematic memorization ability of our pupils.

Diagnosis

The pupils fail to develop their systematic memorization ability, because all the exercises necessary for such developments had been excluded from the curricula of all of the subjects studied in school. This causes of scholar failure of the majority of pupils, caused by clearly inadequate study curricula and the wrong underlying teaching principles.

Here we must especially note that this single monumental pedagogic folly contributes much more to the universalised scholar failure than the insufficient teacher competence and all the other factors, taken together.

Targets

The teaching in the Primary School (1st Cycle of the Basic School) should be based on the usage and development of the systematized memorization ability of the pupils. The elements of critical and creative thinking should be introduced into the curricula gradually, along the learning experience of the pupils, growing in importance as the pupils grow and develop their intellectual capacities, and eventually becoming predominant in the Secondary School.

Measures

Thus, all the pupil textbooks and teacher manuals in all the subjects of all the years need to be revised and republished, to include the exercises for the development of the systematized memorisation ability. This includes poems for the lessons of Portuguese, arithmetical tables , definitions and formulas in Mathematics and Sciences, names of Kings of Portugal and historical dates, National Anthem, and all the other subject matter that can not be deduced logically but needs to be studies and known, for future use.

Additionally, we must stop loosing time uselessly by trying to explore the "critical and independent thinking" in the pupils of the 1st and 2nd cycles of the Basic School, given that the respective intellectual capacities get only developed later, in older pupils.

Definition

We understand by systematically memorized knowledge any knowledge that has been memorized, understood, and properly related to other knowledge already in the pupil's memory.