The sermon and the practice

In 1689, England was enjoying one of its periodic attempts to decide who was entitled to tell everybody else how to live. A king had been beheaded, a republic established, another king restored, Catholics and Protestants had taken turns suspecting one another of treason, and James II had just been chased from the throne in favor of a Dutchman and his wife. After half a century of bloodshed over God, Parliament and the proper management of other people's souls, the English might reasonably have concluded that moral certainty was an expensive luxury.

It was in this atmosphere that Table Talk appeared, a posthumous collection of the sayings of John Selden, recorded decades earlier by his secretary, Richard Milward. Selden was one of those seventeenth-century Englishmen whose curriculum vitae makes the modern intellectual look distressingly underemployed: jurist, parliamentarian, constitutional scholar, historian, Orientalist and formidable student of Jewish law. He had lived through the Civil War and Commonwealth and acquired the useful habit of regarding grand professions of principle with the suspicion normally reserved for a man offering to sell you a horse after midnight.

Religion, to Selden, was partly theology and partly human behaviour, and he was often more interested in the latter. Everyone had a religion, he observed, rather as everyone had a doublet; the cut and colour differed according to fashion. Laws against witchcraft did not necessarily establish the existence of witches. They established that people believed sufficiently in witchcraft to attempt harm by it. Selden's great subject, in other words, was often the distance between what human beings claimed to be doing and what they were actually up to.

Which brings us to hypocrisy.

“Preachers say, Do as I say, not as I do,” Selden observed. Elsewhere he supplied an even neater specimen: “Humility is a virtue all preach, none practice, and yet everybody is content to hear.”

There, in two sentences, is a considerable portion of political, religious and domestic history.

English has since tidied the idea into the more marketable injunction practice what you preach. It sounds almost embarrassingly obvious. One should presumably not thunder against drunkenness while falling off the pulpit, denounce adultery and homosexuality while climbing out of somebody else's bedroom window - or being caught on one's knees in a truck-stop bathroom - or demand sacrifice from the poor while checking whether the ministerial car has heated seats. Yet mankind has devoted extraordinary ingenuity to discovering exceptions.

Selden, of course, had not discovered hypocrisy. He merely gave English a particularly serviceable way of talking about it. The patent had expired rather earlier.

In Matthew's Gospel, Christ warns his listeners about the scribes and Pharisees: obey what they teach, he says, but “do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they preach.” The complaint is almost two thousand years old and was probably elderly even then. It is difficult to imagine the first human settlement surviving long enough to invent pottery without somebody demanding standards of behavior he had no intention of observing himself.

So hypocrisy is not a modern vice, nor a Christian one, nor an English one. It may be among the most democratic of human accomplishments. Kings and priests practice it; revolutionaries and reactionaries practice it; puritans practice it with particular enthusiasm. The interesting question has never been whether people fail to live up to their principles. We all do.

The interesting question is what happens when the people most loudly enforcing the rules quietly exempt themselves from them.

Which brings us, by a route Selden might have appreciated, to the Spanish education system.

This past week Spain has been undergoing its triennial ritual of national flagellation. I do not mean that the Iranian diaspora has been permitted to commemorate Ashura down the Castellana, nor that los picaos of San Vicente de la Sonsierra have suddenly been adopted by the far right as an endangered expression of authentic Spanishness.

No. This form of mortification is newer, bloodless and conducted with spreadsheets.

PISA has arrived.

And this time there is quite a lot to whip ourselves about. Spanish fifteen-year-olds scored 457 points in mathematics, 451 in reading and 477 in science. All three are below the OECD average. In three years, reading has fallen 23 points, mathematics 16 and science eight.

The decline is not uniquely Spanish. That would almost be reassuring. Across the OECD, reading has fallen 28 points since 2015, roughly a year and a half of learning, and mathematics 22, or just over a year. Something has happened to children across the developed world, and it has happened with astonishing speed.

And so out come the pundits, educationalists, ministers, opposition spokesmen and newspaper columnists, each carrying a small section of the elephant.

Screens. Obviously.

A generation that has spent its childhood flicking from TikTok to WhatsApp to YouTube Shorts may conceivably find Don Quijote insufficiently interactive. Even the OECD now warns that technology helps when used deliberately and becomes destructive when it replaces attention, effort and understanding. Artificial intelligence has merely perfected the transaction: why wrestle with a question when a machine can relieve you of the inconvenience of thinking?

Then there is inequality and poverty. Here the evidence becomes less amusing. Socioeconomic background remains one of the strongest predictors of educational performance. A child surrounded by books, conversation, museums and adults with sufficient time and energy to answer questions begins the race several meters ahead of one whose parents return exhausted from badly paid work and are then expected to supervise another evening's algebra.

Immigration gets its inevitable turn at the whipping post. There is some substance here too. Teaching a child who does not yet command the language of instruction is obviously more difficult than teaching one who does. Schools have become more diverse while resources have not followed. But immigration is an explanation requiring rather more care than its loudest enthusiasts generally give it. Some highly immigrant societies continue to perform extremely well, and a substantial proportion of Spain's newcomers arrive already speaking Spanish.

There is Covid. There is absenteeism. There is the disappearance of reading for pleasure. There are exhausted teachers, exhausted parents, overcrowded classrooms, insufficient support staff and educational inequality.

There is probably truth in all of them.

There is another explanation, usually voiced with varying degrees of resentment in countries condemned to occupy the disappointing middle reaches of the table: perhaps PISA itself is biased.

There may be something in this. No examination is handed down from Sinai. PISA emerged from a particular conception of education and measures particular things. The OECD itself describes the object as discovering whether fifteen-year-olds can apply what they know to unfamiliar situations: whether they can reason, interpret, solve problems and make something useful from information rather than merely reproduce it.

There is something suspiciously Protestant about the whole enterprise.

Not Protestant in the modern theological sense, I doubt Martin Luther had strong views on comparative educational metrics, but in the older epistemological one. Go back to the text. Read it yourself. Question the interpretation. Argue with it. Reach a conclusion. The Reformation's revolutionary act was not simply changing what millions of Europeans believed, but challenging who possessed the authority to tell them what the text said.

Catholic Europe inherited a rather different tradition. For centuries Mass was conducted in Latin before congregations who overwhelmingly did not understand the language. Scripture came mediated through an institution, a hierarchy and a man in fancy dress standing at the front of the room pontificating on what it meant. Even today Spain contains millions of people who identify themselves as Catholic but would regard sitting down and actually reading the Bible from beginning to end as an eccentric undertaking bordering on Protestantism.

Receive. Accept. Repeat.

The resemblance to certain forms of education is not entirely accidental.

This in itself is not an explanation for the PISA rankings. If it were, Catholic Poland would be an embarrassment and Japan, South Korea and Singapore would require emergency conversion to Lutheranism. Nor is the OECD oblivious to cultural bias: questions are tested internationally precisely to reduce it.

But the objection is revealing because PISA asks students to do something many traditional education systems have never been terribly comfortable asking anybody to do.

Interrogate the material.

Spain then compounds the joke.

Because the country in which critics complain that an international examination privileges a particular tradition of reasoning and application officially declares that its own children must acquire competences, autonomy, critical thinking and the ability to apply knowledge to new situations.

And then sends them home with armloads of homework.

Lots of it.

Spanish pupils have historically spent considerably more time on teacher-assigned homework than pupils in many of the countries Spain is repeatedly invited to admire. Earlier OECD comparisons put Spain at 7.3 hours a week, almost twice Finland's 3.7 and South Korea's 3.5, and substantially above Canada, Norway, Switzerland and Japan. More recent measurements have changed the definitions and narrowed the difference, but Spanish students still spend slightly more time on homework and additional study than the OECD average. Ask any exhausted mother, and yes, it is still overwhelmingly the mother, who comes home from work only to go back to it.

This might be comforting if educational achievement behaved like a loyalty card: complete ten worksheets and receive the eleventh free.

It doesn't.

The latest PISA evidence finds that the relationship between homework and achievement eventually reverses. Up to a point, more homework is associated with better results. Beyond roughly two hours a day, it is associated with worse ones. The OECD even suggests one possible lesson: learning time inside school may need to become more productive.

There is an awkward thought.

Because homework is not merely something children do after school. It tells us something about what teachers believe learning is. A worksheet sent home to reproduce twenty examples of something already demonstrated in class belongs to a particular conception of education. So does copying notes. So does memorizing the approved answer. So does paying a private tutor in the afternoon to explain what was apparently insufficiently explained during the six hours for which the state had already provided a building and a professional.

And then there is the elephant nobody seems particularly interested in examining: the oposición.

Suddenly Selden's old joke begins to acquire a distinctly Spanish accent.

The very professionals whom Spain asks to produce curious, autonomous, critically minded young people are themselves commonly selected by a system whose central ritual remains the reproduction of enormous quantities of predetermined material before a tribunal.

I know something about the English-teaching version.

A candidate hoping to teach young Spaniards how to communicate in the international language of science, business and approximately half the Internet may be required to devote months, often years, to topics such as La evolución histórica de Estados Unidos: de A. Lincoln a F.D. Roosevelt or Las instituciones británicas. Las Cámaras parlamentarias. El Gobierno. Los partidos políticos y el sistema electoral. La Corona.

One can only marvel at the pedagogical cunning involved.

Apparently, knowing from memory why Big Ears is sitting on Selden's old throne provides indispensable preparation for explaining the present perfect to a bored fourteen-year-old in Plasencia.

A candidate can, theoretically, research these subjects independently. She can consult historians, linguists, original sources and competing interpretations. She can discover what scholars actually argue about them.

Or she can do what almost everybody sensibly does.

Buy a temario from an academy.

There it is: revelation bound and photocopied. The authorized life of Abraham Lincoln. The authorized explanation of the British Parliament. The authorized account of the English verbal system. Not because the academy is necessarily wrong, nor because knowledge is unimportant, but because the examination creates an entirely rational incentive not to investigate.

The purpose is to pass.

You do not get extra points for discovering that the approved answer is simplistic. You get extra risk.

And here that older religious culture reappears. Do not unnecessarily return to the source. Do not squander valuable time discovering rival interpretations. Someone qualified has already digested the material, extracted what matters and arranged it into the form in which it can safely be received.

Receive. Accept. Repeat.

Memorise it. Which is not necessarily the same thing as learning it.

Pass.

Then enter a classroom and teach children to question everything.

Practice what you preach.

This is not an argument against knowledge. The fashionable notion that facts no longer matter because Google possesses them is one of education's more idiotic recent inventions. You cannot think critically about nothing. Knowledge is the raw material from which thought is made.

Nor can the oposición fully explain the sudden collapse in PISA. The system existed when Spanish pupils scored considerably better. Screens, Covid, poverty, immigration, reading habits, family circumstances and educational policy do not cease to exist merely because Spain has an absurd method of selecting public employees.

The question is different.

What kind of professional culture does that method reproduce?

If the most consequential examination in a teacher's career teaches that success ultimately means mastering prescribed material and reproducing it correctly, why should anybody be astonished when that conception of learning survives the examination?

Spain has changed the curriculum without changing the catechism.

Teachers are told to use active methodologies. Project-based learning. Cooperative learning. Competency-based assessment. Students are supposed to investigate, collaborate, discover, question, apply and create.

And many teachers do these things extraordinarily well.

But the institutional message remains wonderfully contradictory. The methodology is modern; the gateway is medieval. Spend your professional life encouraging children to think outside the box, but first demonstrate your fitness to do so by memorizing what is inside one.

No wonder some teachers regard active methodologies as so much theater. When the stakes become genuinely high, university entrance, public examinations, the oposición itself, everybody knows which educational philosophy suddenly is raised from the dead.

Memorize.

Reproduce.

Pass.

The old catechism was at least honest about it.

And this is the part of the PISA autopsy that somehow never seems to make it onto the slab.

We will rewrite another education law. Spain has become remarkably good at that. There will be commissions, digital plans, reading plans, competency frameworks and solemn declarations about innovation. The Left will promise equity. The Right will promise effort. The far Right will presumably demand additional curriculum time for the Reconquista and Hispanidad, preferably taught as racial destiny.

Some of these reforms will be useful.

Yes, classrooms need fewer distractions. Yes, children need to read more. Yes, effort matters. Yes, poverty matters. Yes, teachers need better training and continuous professional development. Yes, technology should be a tool rather than a narcotic. Yes, equity remains essential. And Fernando Savater was surely right that one of education's most important purposes is to show children that alternatives exist to the prejudices of their parents.

With the rise of the far right, vaccine denial, flat-earthers and the continuing conviction that Adam Smith's invisible hand will eventually descend from the heavens and sort everything out, that task is becoming more urgent, not less.

But sooner or later Spain might have to ask an uncomfortable question about the adults as well as the children.

If we want schools that reward curiosity, reasoning, investigation and the intelligent application of knowledge, why do we continue selecting so many of their permanent teachers through a system that so conspicuously rewards something else?

Three and a half centuries ago, Selden recognized the species.

“Do as I say, not as I do.”

Spain has changed the law, rewritten the curriculum, introduced the competencies, bought the tablets, commissioned the reports and preached the virtues of critical thought.

But it has kept the catechism.

The sermon remains excellent.

It is the practice that needs work.