Pumpkins and songs
The results of the PISA tests have been a colossal bucket of ice water that everyone, naturally, is more than willing to forget as soon as possible. The reality, however, is that the Balearic Islands appear buried at the very bottom: if the Spanish state has results in Reading and Mathematics below the average of the OECD and the European Union, the Balearic Islands are the community with the worst results in the Spanish state. That is to say, at the tail end of the tail end. To explain it with concrete examples, the results obtained by the Balearic Islands in PISA imply that many students do not have the minimum competencies to –to quote the report– “interpret and recognize, without direct instructions, how a simple situation can be represented mathematically; for example, comparing the total distance between two alternative routes or converting prices to another currency”. Regarding Reading, they are also not in a position –to quote the report again– “to identify the main idea of a text of moderate length, find information based on explicit criteria, even if sometimes complex, or reflect on the purpose of the texts when explicitly instructed to do so”. For any country, a situation like this is simply devastating. A society based on such low educational levels is destined to suffer abuses and deceptions from charlatans, exploiters, unscrupulous people, demagogues, and authoritarians.
The Government's response to this true disaster was to have Antoni Vera come out to “lament” the PISA results and blame Pedro Sánchez for them. We must not be discouraged: perhaps we will not be capable of correctly reading a simple text, but we will always be able to aspire to be Ministers of Education of the Balearic Government.
The death of Celestí Alomar forced us to remember another free fall, that of the quality of politics in the Balearic Islands. Some of our rulers take it upon themselves to make this fall evident, without the need for anyone to die, which is always something to be grateful for. That with this landscape President Prohens dares to inaugurate the academic year by speaking of “the culture of effort and merit” is a joke without humor. In any case, those who are not satisfied is because they do not want to be: the poor PISA results are not a fact unique to the Balearic Islands, but a global phenomenon that the OECD directly links to the bad use of screens and AI in classrooms, as well as the loss of interest and prestige of reading among young people.
Countries that are traditionally solid and advanced in education have also regressed in an alarming way: this is the case of Germany, which has had the worst PISA results in its history.
This may perhaps have a connection to the fact that a group of citizens from that country, gathered in a musical band called Honk! (which in German means 'idiot') have published a music video with a drinking song in which they exalt the Mallorca of hooligan tourism, an island renamed as 'Malle'. Malle is a diminutive that designates Mallorca understood as a scene of uncontrolled debauchery. 'Go home', they repeat to anyone who doesn't like 'Malle', 'go home'. Here we have the 're' (which is a "tick swollen from having sucked a lot of blood", according to the Alcover-Moll): many Majorcans do not have a home, nor can they consider having one, as a consequence of the economic model that has given rise to the birth of this 'Malle' which indeed represents a burden for the future of everyone. The great replacement will not be carried out by the immigrants who arrive in small boats. It will be a beer-soaked 'Malle'that swallows up a Mallorca loaded with PISA failures.