Boomers, Spain's LOGSE and the uncomfortable truth about education

From EGB to LOGSE: the generational war and the underlying problem

The provocation is easy: a boomer can't install an app or find Yugoslavia on a map. The comeback is just as good: the twenty-year-old trades stocks on their phone but doesn't know how to work. Amid so many barbs, one real question remains, and it isn't who is dumber, but what the education system did to get to this point.

The woodcutter problem: from fractions to sets

The best X-ray of the change isn't an opinion, it's a school problem. In 1950, a woodcutter sold his cart for 100 euros and the cost was 4/5 of the price: fractions. In 1970, the cost was 80%: percentages. In 1980, it was simply 80 euros. And in 1985, "modernity" replaced the woodcutter with a set of coins and asked students to draw a hundred fat dots. The caricature has substance: empty abstraction swallowed up meaningful calculation.

Neither so smart nor so dumb

The decline narrative ignores an uncomfortable nuance. In 1970, compulsory education was extended to age 14, families began to believe in school, and child labour receded. In 1950, illiteracy and school dropout were the norm in villages and working-class neighbourhoods. So boomers were, in fact, the first truly schooled generation. The problem came later, when the LOGSE (Spain's 1990 education law, accused of levelling downwards) and its successors turned classrooms, according to some, into a shop window for credentialism, or, according to others, into a parking lot for youth unemployment.

While grandparents boast about having worked in the factory and grandchildren about programming with twelve AI agents, the unsettling fact remains: the 1970 compulsory schooling reform produced more real pogre than decades of education laws. If standards later collapsed, was it the LOGSE's fault, or the fact that nobody needed to count firewood to survive anymore?