It’s a hard blow: believing yourself to be one of the best and being one of the worst. It happened to me on math exams. I left convinced of the results that the exercises had given me and, when I wanted to contrast them with others, I realized that no one had the same results as me. One day I had come to think – in an evident failed test of self-confidence – that perhaps everyone else was wrong. But not. It was never like that in the case of math. Suspense after suspense, cat after cat recovered with a ‘sufi’. A ‘sufi’, a sufficient for those who now no longer know what it is, was a bare five that tasted like heaven. Because suspending was a move. At home there were bad faces and at the end of the course you could repeat, so for the price I had I went with enthusiasm to all the reinforcement classes, without traumas, and I attended all the private ones that my parents well paid for. I got my act together and luckily the day came. I got rid of them to give myself to letters. I remember it with a certain epic although the time has also passed when I considered it funny not to find out anything in math class: it is a lack that sooner or later reveals limitations for adult life. At least I have the refuge of letters.
The resounding PISA report that we all already know does not do either no grace I don’t know where, but money should come from somewhere less important, less transcendent, less compromising for our future to change from top to bottom. a failed pedagogical and social system. Because what these results reflect and the multiple causes attributed to them are no longer just something pedagogical. It is social, economic and ideological. There is not even the consolation that others have fared worse because the vast majority have fared better. Although those of us who already have a long way to go will remember that before, not that long ago, Arguing that so many others had also done badly was of no use, because there was always someone who answered you that the ones you have to look at are the best.