Next week, the students of the tribe will face the selectivity exam, accepting the inexorable destiny of those who ---in my time--- obligatorily experienced the eruptions and scabs of chickenpox. Let the reader not be mistaken, yours truly is not a militant of trauma-free pedagogy; academic life (and biological life in general) demands a revalidation of our knowledge, often without our examiner having warned us of the test and, therefore, sitting our buttocks in a desk for an hour to summarize what we believe we know, with good handwriting and due argumentation, is no existential sacrifice. However, the selectivity exam is a nauseating invention, with a communist and Francoist stench, an anatomical inspection of students who are treated like a mere herd, regardless of their interests and singularity of knowledge.
I know that lately our pedagogues have tried to personalize this particular slaughterhouse of youth, but far from risking more opportune changes (namely, promoting that each faculty in the country conducts its respective entrance exam, which would imply greater competition between centers and a more reasoned specialization of students; terms that surely must cause trembling in our Leninist educators), the supposed experts in the art of education have fallen into the most tempting craters of the posmo flaw. Now they say that the exams will have content with less memoristic weight ---what before, in times of heteropatriarchy, we called "vomiting"--- and, following the idiolect of these bores, that the matter will have a more "argumentative" and "competential" character. As the prophet said; by their language you will recognize them. It never fails, imposture is the twin of the kitsch.
It's somewhat embarrassing to have to recount such basic things, but since Platonic times we know that we only know what we remember. This idea does not imply that our teachers have to tattoo La mort i la primavera on the skin of poor Catalan teenagers, far from it. But if one wants to do things as diverse as interpreting a Scriabin sonata, reflecting on the concept of gender in Butler, or even inventing a new soft drink, one must first put in the effort and elbow grease to assimilate its harmony, phrases, and elements. I understand that everything that has always been done in a certain way always turns out to be an insult to the promoters of a more inclusive, transversal, and most xupi-derived education; but memory (namely, the mixture between the orality that is practiced and the writing that retains its sonority) is a quintessential aspect of Western culture. If we have no memory, that's how it goes, sooner or later we will fall into oblivion.
To argue without having the cake batter cooked in one's brain is like wanting to repair a car without a toolboxAnticipating the professionally offended, and in honor of my profession as an amateur thinker, it is evident that memory should not fall into mere informational repetition and that the country's students must be capable of developing critical thinking as is required. But to argue without having the cake batter previously cooked in one's brain is like wanting to repair a car without a toolbox. As if that weren't enough, a delusional controversy over the weight of spelling mistakes has been added to this nonsense about the new types of exams.Last week, some media reported that spelling errors would only be relevant in language exams, a criterion that the minister of the matter ---Núria Montserrat--- decided to change after a morning of commotion incan X. Before discussing the fact in question, it is worth noting that it is worrying to see how governments only react when social media generatesgossip.
Beyond the political mess, it is still surprising that the importance of spelling must be explained to our managers and politicians, supposedly specialists in university affairs. It ultimately produces a certain anguish that this servant is forced to remember that a philosopher, a mathematician, a historian, or a physicist cannot perform their academic work if they write like shit, and that the administration, with its previous policy of overlooking mistakes, was only doing a favor to supreme ignorance. There are things, believe me, dear pedagogues, that are better not to discuss. One must write without mistakes, period, in the same way that a musician must tune their instrument because—no matter how much testosterone they have in their fingers—if they play out of tune, they will only produce noise. A scientist too, for they must write academic papers with the same level of asepsis with which they operate on a liver or try to find the original genome of one of those viruses that cause us to cough.
All this, I insist, is very tiresome to have to write in the year 2025. Not all problems are caused by the existence of the selectivity exam, but I would say that a general rethinking of university access would serve to put a muted nuance on them. In any case, and since the administration has not apologized for this whole farce, I believe our young people deserve our apology, because, in days when they should have been focused on their notes and concentrating, we have given them an even more appalling spectacle than this absurd exam. And that's saying something…