“Of the 32 participants in the Qatar 2022 World Cup, South Korea is the country that obtains the best results in standardized mathematics tests. Argentina is in the middle of the results”. This is how the report “World education: How are countries performing in terms of education?” carried out by the Argentinian Education Observatory on the basis of international data from Unesco and the World Bank, where 10 indicators were selected to show the educational situation of each country participating in the group stage matches of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.

The report shows that Saudi Arabia, the team that handed Argentina one of the toughest World Cup defeats in their history, are one of the countries that invest the most in education with 8% of its GDP, while Argentina achieves around 5%. Poland is, in group C which it shares with Arabia, Argentina and Mexico, the country which has obtained the best academic results in recent years.

Who would win the title of world champion in this hypothetical educational world championship in mathematics and languages? Good, South Korea is the world champion in learning mathematics, followed by Japan. As Canada, Denmark and Poland share the podium at the Language Learning World Cup. Now, if the competition depended on the number of students who graduate from high school, South Korea would once again be the champions, followed by Canada and Croatia. The bad news is that in several of the indicators, Argentina is in an intermediate zone of the chart. In other words, we would not pass the group stage.

Something similar or worse to what is happening in Argentina is happening with the Latin American countries playing this World Cup in Qatar: Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador, Mexico and Costa Rica, and African countries like Senegal, Ghana, Morocco, Tunisia, where none would play a final instance in a competition based on the results of quality of teaching, learning, investment and school attendance. Asians and countries in the northern hemisphere have a noticeable advantage over others. Of course, these results, very well elaborated and presented in a didactic way by the Argentinian Observatory of Education, do not come as a surprise for Argentina, as was the result of the first match last Tuesday during the FIFA World Cup in Qatar. Unfortunately, we are used to expecting more from football than from our educational quality, and this resignation It shows that as a society we are lowering the demands and expectations of our school of which we are so proud, based not on the success but on the solid results, that our popular and inclusive education system has brought to us.

History teaches us that in 1845, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento was in exile in Chile when his friend, the Transandean President Manuel Montt, entrusted him with the study of the educational systems of the United States and Europe and the development of an educational plan for this country. Sarmiento did this by traveling in the United States and Europe and this is how popular education was born, with the idea of ​​educating everyone. Montt rejects it because Chile believed in a mixed system, an educational circuit for the elites and another dedicated to religious institutions for the popular sectors. Fortunately, Sarmiento began to apply it in our country in 1869, already being president. A pedagogical model embodied 12 years later in the 1420 law and which reached its peak during the 20th century.

Unlike other American countries, our beginnings were virtuous, we had the plan, the tools, the political will and the conviction to develop an inclusive and quality educational model that had a great influence on social changes, demands which led to the civic participation of the middle and lower strata who flocked to the popular vote and started participatory democracy. The problem is that, for about three decades, gradually, we started to lose the compass. Argentina lives in a permanent educational anomie, we have laws and regulations with noble objectives that are not achieved, whose times are only cold letters that do not impact the responsibility of educational governments. Everyone is filling their mouths with pledges to fight for education, yet no one seems to care too much.

We have seen this during the pandemic, where with the exception of a group of parents known as Organized Parents and some provincial governments like the municipal government and Mendoza, the rest, the majority of society and the unions of teachers, obediently accepted that the boys They spent almost two years with the schools closed. In the province of Santa Cruz, high school students graduated in 2021 who, between union disputes and the pandemic, had less than two years of effective and face-to-face lessons. Examples like this, negative, there are many and we tolerate them. The secret to improvement is in social demand, without it there will be no change. It doesn’t matter what our politicians offer anymore, if we don’t demand and increase the demand, if we don’t shape a social pact around goals to improve our education, the odds will fade.

Last Tuesday we suffered from the defeat in the football World Cup, some news reported that the mood was so low that many chose not to go to work, extinguished, sad by a sporting defeat which, in a football-loving country, is extremely understandable. What is good is that there is revenge and that on Saturday we resume competition. In teaching, we already know in advance that we would not even be ranked in the second or third rank of the best, revenge is not immediate and, with luck, by doing things correctly from now on, it it will take us several decades to be competitive in any comparative work that uses contrasting results with athletic competition. It may be a game, but it’s also a clear way of understanding that in education, if you don’t wake up quickly, in the future, there will be no more Olympic towers.