Spanish teacher says ESO students cannot read

Spanish teacher says ESO students cannot read

A public secondary school teacher in Spain states plainly that she has third-year ESO (Compulsory Secondary Education) students who cannot read and teaches material from fifth-grade primary school. This remark, made in an interview published by La Vanguardia, captures the frustration that led tens of thousands of teachers in Catalonia to join a strike on February 11. Behind the complaint lies something more troubling than resource shortages: part of the student body reaches mid-secondary education unable to decipher text.

The interviewee points to poorly implemented inclusion—"minimizing everything related to students with special needs through inclusion, but this inclusion is ineffective because there are insufficient resources"—and avoids other explanations. For many readers, this silence is the real news.

What exactly does the interviewed teacher say?

The testimony refers not to isolated cases or a specific classroom, but to a level: third year of ESO, a stage where students are expected to read to learn, not learn to read. The teacher adds that she covers fifth-grade primary content and notes the issue extends beyond academics: "Being paid poorly, students disrespecting you, working unpaid extra hours every week," she lists.

Her official diagnosis focuses on lack of means. However, an unspoken accusation looms: that mixing diverse levels, languages, and educational backgrounds has been managed by lowering standards for everyone. The interview does not state this explicitly; readers infer it.

The central argument: fewer resources or lower expectations?

Some argue the problem is budgetary and structural: without real support, inclusion becomes one teacher juggling too many roles. Others counter that the system has promoted students by decree for years, causing standards to collapse regardless of funding. Both perspectives coexist unresolved in the interview.

One teacher shares personal experience: when his son learned to read ahead of peers, the teacher criticized him for being advanced; when he used math concepts not yet taught, he was corrected; when his English pronunciation surpassed his teacher's, he faced issues. His conclusion is uncomfortable: the system equalizes downward and penalizes excellence.

Reading skills: the alarming data point

Literacy levels have become the thermometer for systemic failure. On a bus, a passenger heard a teenager reading aloud from a phone and described it as disastrous. In a waiting room, another person overheard a young man asking whether ascending or descending order sorts prices from cheapest to most expensive, while his companion hesitated similarly.

These are anecdotes, not statistics, and should be treated as such. Yet they align with the teacher’s statement and broader suspicions: the issue affects not only foreign-born students but an entire generation raised on screens with reduced reading demands. Debates about language and origin permeate diagnoses, though the original interview omits them.

Demographic panic and conspiracy theories

Some analysts suggest the decline serves power structures: governing an ignorant populace is easier, and certain programs require no literacy. Others attribute it to forty years of successive education reforms, where basics like rule of three were learned at home because textbooks omitted them. A third view combines these factors with mass immigration of non-Spanish-speaking students—a factor absent from the initial interview.

Regardless, the result is identical: a system certifying competencies that do not exist. The ESO diploma validates training that, according to the testimony, some students lack. This is not just a classroom issue; it is a national crisis.

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The most striking aspect is not that a teacher reports her ESO students cannot read. It is that neither she nor the journalist mention the underlying causes.