By the year 2000, Argentina was the region’s leader in international education tests. He now occupies eighth place.
“What better than a rainy Sunday to read good Argentine literature. “Uncensored,” he tweeted a few days ago. Axel Kicillofgovernor of the Province. Victoria Villarruelvice president of the Nation, picked up the gauntlet and replied: “It is never a good day to read books that they glorify pedophilia and sexualize children” and also “Don’t mess with our children!”
Each one standing in a corner of the ring, they made public their gaze on one of the discussions that resonated on networks and in the media: for or against what books like Earth Eaterof Dolores Reyes, The Adventures of China Ironof Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, If you weren’t such a girlof Sol Fantiny The premiumsof Aurora Venturiniwere they available in Buenos Aires secondary schools? Not as a mandatory bibliography, he clarified Alberto Sileonithe person responsible for the Education portfolio of the Province, but as “support tools for teachers, which open a world to which many children do not have access.” Available in the school library, the official also said.
Indeed, as was pointed out from a corner of the ring, there is pure Argentine literature in all of this. In fact, as was pointed out from the opposite corner, the books include consensual sex scenes and also scenes of sexual abuse. Sometimes, against girls, boys or adolescents. Sometimes in a literary key and sometimes in a non-fiction essay key: Sol Fantín, a real survivor, narrates that real hell.
That hell for which, according to figures prepared by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights of the Nation between 2020 and 2021, 9 boys, girls or adolescents per day consulted as victims of these crimes. The vast majority – 77% – women. What age? Especially between 12 and 17 years old. The age of going to secondary school.
Some books and their authors were attacked for their content: they were accused of showing “pedophilia and sexualization of children.” There were reparations and growth in sales of some titles.
The relevance of books to be in schools was passionately attacked and defended. There were screenshots of two paragraphs of a 176-page book to demand that this content leave the school premises as soon as possible, and there were acts of resistance and redress so that no one would take those and all the other paragraphs – and their authors – of the libraries. Something was lost along the way: the readers. Your real possibilities of understanding compared to those four books. Or anyone else. Or a photocopy. Or the statement of a mathematical problem.
On any given Friday in November, 57 kilometers from the Government House of the Province and 24 kilometers from the Senate of the Nation, María gets on a school bus that is no longer in good condition but which, dilapidated, travels through different neighborhoods every week. from Esteban Echeverría’s party. She has a shopping cart, also dilapidated, and a clear objective: to gather all the vegetables and fruit that she can take from the wholesalers’ discards at the Central Market so that the house where she lives with her husband and three children can reach the food.
He will lift tomatoes from the floor, rummage bundles of chard inside a dump truck, check on the heads of garlic that fall from a box that can no longer go on sale. will tell Infobae that her husband’s recorded salary is no longer enough, that meat is now impossible to buy. And what fruit too.
As he passed, in the middle of narrating his povertythat of his family, that of his neighbors and that of 52.9% of Argentines, talks about his second son, the oldest of those who are still at home: “He started secondary school this year but he asked me to go to one not so close to home. He finished sixth grade and barely reads or writes. He is ashamedthen he doesn’t want to go with the neighborhood kids. I don’t know how to help him, I don’t know how to teach him to read and he didn’t learn at school,” says María, a resident of the El Fortín neighborhood.
Literacy and education specialists point out the importance of deepening teachers’ knowledge of reading and teaching reading in first grade.
His partner in the dilapidated bus and inspecting expert tomatoes is called Vanesa. She is a single mother of five children, the drop in consumption left her without a job in the sneaker workshop that employed her and, she says, she is “an expert in widening stews.” Two of her five children still go to school: “The third grader recognizes letters but can’t form the word when she tries to read or write. The fourth year of high school reads but not straightand some things he understands and others he doesn’t. But I see my friends and they are all the same, no one understands everything that is written, and if it is longer it is worse,” he describes. And he focuses on what he does: filling the mess with food that no one would pay for and that is on the way to rot.
Neither María’s son nor Vanesa’s are isolated cases, nor a striking coincidence on a bus in the Buenos Aires suburbs. In Argentina, this country in which 66.1% of children under 14 years of age live below the poverty line, almost half (46%) of third graders are at the lowest reading level of those stipulated by the Regional Comparative and Explanatory Study (ERCE) carried out by UNESCO in 2019. That, in Creole, means that when they read – if they can do so – a text designed for their age, they cannot find information literally when asked to do so by a slogan, nor find relationships between different scenes that are also described literally, nor formulate an inference based on what the text suggests or reiterates. In very Creole: they don’t understand.
A 46% of boys and girls in third grade who are at the lowest reading level is a more critical scenario than that of Latin America in general, where 36.7% of boys of that age are at that level.
“Society has not become truly aware of the seriousness of the educational situation. There is more than 50% poverty, and if we add to that the low educational quality, the difficulty of finishing secondary school with adequate knowledge in terms of being able to understand a text that is read, what future are we going to have? “, he emphasizes. Ana Maria Borzonea leading specialist in early literacy.
The crisis for Argentine children is even deeper among students with a lower socioeconomic level: at that end of the population pyramid – increasingly widening -, 61.5% of third grade students barely reach the lowest level of reading. On the other side of the socioeconomic scenario, the results also worsened over time: one in four students from the richest families is at the lowest reading level.
Governor Axel Kicillof tweeted a photo of himself reading “Cometierra” by Dolores Reyes. Source: X
On the other side of the possibilities of reading-comprehension, Argentine students who reach the highest reading level among those established by UNESCO are barely a minority: 14%. Again, performance is below the region, which averages 21%.
“Learning to read and write is the foundation for all learning. of the different areas. Having difficulties in reading comprehension creates barriers to acquiring other knowledge because it is the key to access knowledgea prerequisite to learn and above all to be able to understand,” explains Sandra Zieglerdirector of the Master’s Degree in Social Sciences with a focus on Education at FLACSO.
The Learn tests that were carried out in 2021 did not give better signs. 44% of students who finished primary school during the coronavirus pandemic were at the basic or lower level in terms of their reading and text comprehension skills.
“It is urgent to train specialists in reading and Kids have to learn to read and write in first grade. The authorities continue to insist with third degreebut no more time can be wasted, a boy cannot reach fourth grade practically without reading or writing. A student who does not learn on time leads to an educational deterioration that only deepens,” says Borzone, and adds: “We have chosen to teach reading through what is called psychogenesis, in which each child becomes It supposes, it is building its link with reading and writing. We can’t expect kids to guesswe must teach how it has been scientifically proven to work. Until that changes we will be in a deepening crisis.”
And high school students? In 2022, the results of the PISA Tests, which are carried out internationally, showed that in Argentina 7 out of 10 15-year-old boys from the lowest socioeconomic level do not reach the minimum reading leveland neither do the 32% of students who occupy the most privileged place in terms of material resources.
Reading comprehension results worsen among students with fewer economic resources. (NA)
Among the reasons why the crisis in reading comprehension is deepening, Ziegler describes: “There were no literacy policies that were maintained Over time, teachers work on the topic alone and there is very little presence of literacy teaching in the basic training of teachers. Another reason is that teachers often change grades, and it would be important to have teachers with experience in literacy teaching the first cycle of primary school. Newbies frequently reach these grades and very experienced profiles are needed. Sometimes Expecting children to learn on their own causes them to remain adrift.”.
Research shows that if we put 100 Argentine students in their final year of high school in a classroom, there would only be 13 in a position to complete the expected knowledge in the expected time. That crisis that already appears in third grade, when the ability to read and understand is measured with standardized tests, at the end of high school is a widespread drama. AND a fast expanding drama: Two years ago, only 21.5% of adolescents achieved satisfactory knowledge of language and mathematics at the end of their compulsory education. Five years ago, 34.1% of students achieved that goal.
In 2022, the National University of Cuyo measured the reading comprehension of its students: only 4 out of 10 in higher education understood what they read. 58% had difficulties expressing in writing what they had studied. The investigation was another reflection of that Argentine decline that the tests carried out on students in the first cycle of primary school are beginning to reveal and that deepens with the passing of the years, poverty and structural neglect.
This note has many statistics, it is true. It abounds in numbers that can overwhelm, bore, outrage, move or be too cold. But what would it be like to be faced with this text, or any other, and not be able to get bored, or indignant, or moved, or overwhelmed because, above all, there is no way to interpret what it says? Imagine that helplessnessdear reader, that of the inhabitants of the educational decline of an Argentina that in 2000 was the leader of the region in the PISA tests and now occupies eighth place in Latin America.
In the midst of the discussion about which books reach the classrooms or the school library, there were no major pronouncements, neither from officials nor from ordinary citizens, about this helplessness. That nudity that makes a 13-year-old boy move his daily life to another neighborhood because he is embarrassed that his neighbors realize that he barely reads and writes. That he is that small even though he has already gotten big.
