Libro

MEDIA LITERACY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE
Strategies, Debates and Good Practices
in the reading of the results, from parents to the ministers, smile if numbers are
treated in blue or disapprove with a grimace whether it is red typeface.
2.1. Approved or disapproved
During the 11 years of school life I remember with pleasure a section reserved
for the opinion of the tutor in the register of notes. I liked very much reading her
advice, I felt as if all this time in class she really would have seen me, had
understood who I was, what I liked and did not.
I never found out why in the register they didn´t include notes for kindness,
responsibility, joy, openness, creativity and so many other things we could have
had each student in that classroom. As a child I always found strange that
teachers praised the "great students" named as such only by their grades
without, sometimes, taking into account the human quality of the same, which
sometimes wasn't as good as their school record.
"Silberman about U.S. education: We are very good in those themes (math,
language, etc.). But we have failed miserably to teach individuals to behave like
human beings. Just look around to corroborate. Definitely, we have been
emphasizing the wrong syllable" (Buscaglia, 1992:4).
What are we putting numbers on? What are we valuing?
No one wonders if children are feeling more confident, or if they demonstrate
respect for others, or his or her ability to make decisions and deal with problems
has increased, and so on. The records do not reveal growth in capacities of
abstraction, empathy, metacognition or psychosocial development of the
student, however, we continue describing in numbers the absorption of
concepts instead of the processes that kids create to understand the world that
surround them.
If the importance of things lies in the numbers that represent them, to be
commensurable, accurate and palpable, then should not we start measuring
items that really concern the education that boys and girls need today?
I note, like many others that if something is not quantifiable it´s market value is
diffuse. When I explain to my friends how much I make, the price of my car or
what is the monthly cost of my son's school I´m also indicating the intrinsic
value of these issues. Life, some say, is priceless (I assume because of its
incalculable value), however, when I compare it to bullets prices, for example,
seems to lose its survival ability automatically.
Continue considering education as the engine that promotes accumulation of
content, empowering a rating system with indicators that are not intertwined to
capacities, it´s foolish especially at this time. The educational paradigm is
worm-eaten. We have various tools such as: analog and digital libraries, an
incredible amount of applications on mobile devices of various kinds,
specialized free programs, etc, that can help us to reach different issues daily.
Common education programs forget these and, instead of helping us to be
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