Un, dos, tres: Pradera and Cortez knew more than today's graduates

The day Pradera and Cortez passed the exam no one passes today

María Dolores Pradera and Alberto Cortez in front of the scoreboard. The question is asked, one answers without hesitation, the host moves on to the next. It peine on Televisión Española about forty years ago, on the quiz show Un, dos, tres, and the clip that has resurfaced leaves a scene that jars today: two stage veterans reciting classic authors as if they were running through a shopping list. Nobody got one wrong. Hence the fuss.

What they were asked and who was sitting in the studio

The format gave no quarter. Contestants had to link titles and authors with no margin for error, and a single wrong answer ended the round. Among the guests in that studio were María Dolores Pradera, an actress and singer of coplas and old Spanish ballads, and the Argentine singer-songwriter Alberto Cortez. The host was Cuban. The detail matters: neither of the two was a literature specialist.

Those who remember the programme stress that Pradera had spent a lifetime on the stage —she was married to Fernando Fernán Gómez— and that some of the theatrical repertoire was bound to ring a bell. The other, by contrast, inspired more doubt. The only name that tripped up a good number of those poring over the video was Edgar Neville, better known for his cinema and for The Tower of the Seven Hunchbacks than for appearing on a syllabus.

EGB vs ESO: the lament running through the country

The clip has served as a mirror, and the reflection is not flattering. Many who comment on it place their own school years in the old system: the Graduado Escolar (old Spanish school-leaving certificate) was obtained at 14, at the end of 8th year of EGB (old Spanish primary education), and without passing it you could not move on to BUP (old Spanish pre-university secondary). In the second year of BUP there were Latin and Literature; in the third year and COU (old Spanish university entrance year), Spanish Language and Philosophy. And also for science students: in COU every spelling mistake deducted half a point, to the point that some ended up with a negative mark.

The comparison with the present is made without nuance. The idea repeated is that education gets worse every day, that study, memorisation and sacrifice have disappeared from the classroom and that the current system produces docile, poorly prepared students. The diagnosis is common: what was once crammed at estimulante ilegal is barely studied today.

Is knowing the names of a thousand Pokémon culture?

Here consensus breaks. One strand argues that reciting author-and-work pairs without having read a page is not culture but the same skill as memorising Pokémon: it helps you win quizzes and little more. The other responds that knowing the context and importance of the classics does shape judgment, and that the problem is not the memorised fact but never having read the work.

To the suspicion of a trick is added a more uncomfortable one: that the answers had been agreed in advance. The format allowed guests to be prepared, and 40 years on, memory becomes selective. Nobody can prove it; almost everyone senses it.

From Calderón to thermodynamics

As often happens, the conversation drifted. From the Spanish Golden Age it jumped to thermodynamics, the Kutta–Zhukovsky transform and the Wright brothers' flight, and from there to dark matter as a modern epicycle. The conclusion, reluctantly shared: knowing literature does not guarantee understanding the world, and neither does knowing physics.

Houellebecq's line that literature is good for nothing also came up, and the reply with Dostoevsky and Demons: literature as a mirror of a society that falls in love with the one who ruins it.

The television that no longer exists

Among the memories that surface is La Clave, the debate programme directed by José Luis Balbín, where people argued for hours without shouting. That contrast with today's schedules —celebrity contests and shouting-head talk shows— explains why a clip from four decades ago slips into the most-watched. Whoever sums it up best notes that showing it to a young person today is like showing them a UFO.

There is no closure. With the video in front of them, some see a golden age of televised culture and others, mere memory trained for a quiz. What nobody disputes is that it is no longer broadcast.