The comprehensiveness

Comprehensive education continues to be an unfulfilled promise of schools. And although it is frequently mentioned in official speeches and plans, and in almost all the IEPs of almost all educational institutions in Latin America, in practice we are far from achieving comprehensive education. We work, measure, and evaluate almost exclusively academic aspects. It has reached such an extreme that the region's Ministries of Education themselves speak of "academic years" or "areas of knowledge" and determine grade promotion solely based on academic criteria.

When deciding on student promotion in schools and universities, the achievement of "academic" subjects is almost exclusively considered; there are no assessments of attitudes or competencies, and there are no teachers, curricula, hours, classes, or texts dedicated to socio-affective or practical work.

This has been public policy in education for many years. We live in a school biased toward academics. And this rationalist bias has been incorporated into all schools and has been defended by teachers, parents, and students. Hence, students and parents—even at Merani—are surprised by or reject attitudinal assessments and promotion decisions based on socio-affective, practical, and holistic criteria. Traditional curricula lack subjects for self-understanding, recognizing nonverbal language, or developing our own life plans that take into account our interests and social needs. Today's schools don't teach us how to invest money wisely, plan our time in the medium and long term, organize a party, dance at a rumba, or improve assertiveness in the thousands of activities that daily life demands. For some very strange reason, someone came up with the idea that learning calculus was more important than learning to understand oneself, or that knowing the location of the rivers, mountains, and lakes of Africa and Asia was more important than helping individuals develop their autonomy, their understanding of context, and their solidarity.

Today's school is very little comprehensive, as it has fragmented practically everything. It has fragmented knowledge into subjects and devoted almost all of its time to academic learning, while going to school is almost synonymous with learning a set of academic subjects. In this way, we continue to teach children fragmented knowledge that maintains an almost exclusive emphasis on the cognitive.

It is true that at the Alberto Merani Institute we have made progress toward comprehensiveness by incorporating the socio-affective dimension, by creating the Human Understandings area, by assessing attitudes, and by establishing requirements to assess the level of consolidation of ethical competencies at the end of each cycle. We've also made progress by recognizing that arts and physical education are areas with similar timeframes, teachers, and importance to all other areas. Even so, comprehensiveness still has pending objectives in our educational innovation. For example, we still need to incorporate the socio-affective dimension into each of the competencies taught in the various areas. We made significant progress during the 2021 seminar, but it remains a task yet to be consolidated. After all, we are children of Kant and Piaget. They have been our leading theorists for decades, and perhaps that is why cognitive development continues to predominate in our approach.