Public education is an instrument of indoctrination and socialist cultural hegemony
What good does it do a country if university students well-qualified in basic disciplines and languages emigrate because they find no decent jobs and more unqualified unemployed immigrants arrive (including minors) and no-one knows what to do with them? Some commerce is illegal. Some adolescents neither study nor work because there are no institutions or resources, and some end up as delinquents because they have no life model.
Education in our country is abandoned because state government parties PSOE and PP simply cannot agree. For any neutral observer, our school dropout figures (> 15%) and Spain’s unemployment rate for those younger than 26 years (> 28%) evidence a failed education system and lack of adaptation to the labour market. This texts deals with the factors that impact failed public education: university misgovernment; rectors’ mediocrity; abusive use of rankings and metrics; deficient selection and evaluation of Primary/Secondary Education teachers; an absurd university access system; no Higher Secondary Education orientation; disappeared student effort; no teacher commitment; distorted learning as a means to obtain degrees; slowly and gradually lowering expected level.
Lack of connection between academy and society, present in vocational training, culminates in Master’s and PhD degrees. There is one primary profound factor: disciplines held back and rigid degrees. In degrees, students are well-trained about basic isolated contents, but the interdisciplinary connection is non-existent, ignored by many teachers who tend to spend their whole academic life working on the same contents.
Reality is always complex. There are no real engineering, biology or health problems where there is no economics, sociology and psychology because human resources must be managed and budgeted, let alone computing and languages with digitisation and globalisation. However, taught subject matters are held back and are not cross-sectional in nature. It is striking that firms in Spain do not value Master’s and PhD degrees, which advanced countries value and pay for.
In Spain, a PhD degree beyond the academic sector is irrelevant, and is neither appreciated nor demanded, not only because of the small business sector size, but also because research themes are far beyond firms’ scope; who will lead them if teachers close in on their themes and are not connected to business life for having no incentive to do so? The university adds very little value to business production because it is disconnected.
Part of the responsibility lies in the evaluation criteria of classification agencies’ appraisals, which are almost completely managed and directed by politicians and advisors who ignore interdisciplinary reality. Their quality indicators are designed as if most degree holders were academic, but who will not be, and should be better oriented to the labour market. As Germany does that well, and it would suffice to copy and adapt vocational training too.
Companies neither trust nor value PHD degrees in general for which purely academic research themes are generated rather than training partly in real problems. Research that approaches reality is not dealt with because no-one wants to take risks. There are no incentives and no university-company contact, which should be leaders’ priority objective. PhD degrees with mentions of quality do not have enough students because companies are not interested in them and, as public sector contracts only a few, there are barely any students. Cases of plagiarism and turbid PhDs of politicians that appear in the press are partly motivated because programmes need to find fictitious students to reach the minimum number. There are PhD degrees for politicians to show off or go to University if they are not chosen on a given list. They are political and “negotium causa” PhDs, also known as “honoris causa”.
Spain has become an involuntary supporter of advanced countries. Our taxes pay training so that degree holders well-training in basic knowledge emigrate to countries that better attend to interdisciplinarity and make the most of our students. Here they are wasted and live badly doing jobs that have nothing to do with their university training.