Pablo da Silveira –in charge of the Ministry of Education of the Oriental Republic of Uruguay– was the first guest at the Ticmas Auditorium at the Buenos Aires Book Fair, thus inaugurating the talks of an avant-garde audience when it comes to dealing with issues on the educational field, entrepreneurship, professionalization, teaching and skills, among other topics of interest in 21st century education. The interview was conducted by Patricio Zunini; here we reproduce it.
—Before we get into what has to do with management, I have a question for you. Because you are a PhD in Philosophy: how do you live philosophy and management, which, a priori, would seem to be, I am not saying oil and water, but not so complementary?
—They are successive reincarnations. There was a previous reincarnation, in which I was a university professor who was dedicated to researching, writing and teaching, and a few years ago I began to get involved in the environment of the current president of the Republic of Uruguay, Luis Lacalle Pou. Since the previous elections, which was the first time he ran. And once we won, it was clear that this responsibility was going to fall on me. And, to put it briefly, they are incompatible, they are two activities that require a degree of concentration and dedication, such a great effort, that it is a fiction to think that one is going to be able to do the management part well while continuing to read philosophy. I hope to resume it once the management ends.
—What had he majored in Philosophy?
—I dedicated myself to issues of political philosophy and, in particular, for many years I worked on what is academically called Government of Educationwhich is precisely how to translate the preferences of citizens and the democratic decision process into institutions that are capable of governing education and developing policies for education.
—Uruguay has had Ceibal as its figurehead for many years. He has always been a model that the entire region looked to to study, to learn, and also to compare itself. Now you are proposing a comprehensive education that goes from the initial level to the end of the last year of secondary school. How will it be measured? How are they going to propose it? And also, in education, 18 years from now, you will no longer be in the Government. How are those policies going to continue with students starting now?
—Ceibal is indeed, perhaps, the most emblematic experience that Uruguay has had in education for years. I think its success is due to many things. One is that Uruguay is a very politically stable country and we have the habit of maintaining policies above changes, not only in government, but also in government parties. That game of continuity and innovation, typical of a democracy that works. Ceibal is currently going through his fourth government. Before taking office, we were clear that we were going to maintain it. And not only maintain it, but we were going to reinforce it. Ceibal began as an example of the Uruguayan case of a project that everyone knows, OLPCwhich was basically a laptop distribution project.
—With the idea of Nicholas Negroponte…
-Exactly. negroponte He was the one who prompted it. Uruguay pretty quickly moved away from that model; which was good because it failed all over the world and ended up shutting down and doesn’t exist anymore. Uruguay began to deviate from that model in various ways. Some were technological: for example, they opted not for a very complex connectivity system that the original project proposed, but for a conventional and commercial connectivity model. He quickly got out of the specific OLPC machines that locked you in a world that had no contact with reality and went to work with commercial teams. A few years later, awareness began to grow that the core of the effort was not in distributing iron. You can distribute a lot of equipment, but if there aren’t good platforms… and for there to be good platforms, there has to be a good educational conception of what I want to do with it. We took another step, which is to transform Ceibal into the educational innovation agency with technologies in Uruguay. Much closer to what happens in the educational field, closer to teachers. And we did it trying to overcome a problem: Ceibal had a very good proposal and it was very well thought out, but only 11% of the students were doing it. And that had to do with the scarce construction of bridges between Ceibal and the technological and the strictly educational.
—When you say 11%, are you talking about urban or rural? Because Uruguay has these two quite different problems.
-In the set. However, at this point we have very good connectivity that reaches the entire country. In the middle, something else must be explained: we came to the Government with a lot of ideas and a lot of education proposals on March 1, 2020. On March 13, the pandemic broke out in Uruguay, and our beautiful plans had to be turned upside down, because suddenly everything had changed. There, Ceibal gained a lot of prominence, because we were the first to interrupt classes and also the first to restart them, and the objective was that everything that was going to be lost in person, we had to win virtually through Ceibal.
—In that sense, Uruguay had a much shorter quarantine. Already in 2020 they had returned to the classrooms…
—Yes, in reality it was only three months of total closure. But then we started, little by little, precisely with the rural schools, which were the ones with the least connectivity and the least risk of contagion. And then we increased with a series of criteria, and at the same time we greatly reinforced Ceibal. Which means two things. First, we had a huge problem: Ceibal had guaranteed connectivity in the schools, but that was what was closed. So it had to be secured in homes and that included technological challenges and business challenges. We had to negotiate with all the telephone companies so that there is free data so that low-income children could use this instrument. And then there was really a factor that is not the merit of the Government or the educational authorities, but rather the merit of the Uruguayans: teachers, students, families turned massively to Ceibal. At a certain point the number of people who used Ceibal multiplied by eleven. That meant a very big technological challenge of reinforcing servers and a lot of structures, to resist that wave of demand that was enormous and that had not happened until then.
—And what about teacher training?
—There is, but all this that we talked about was the scenario of the pandemic, where we had to do all these things very quickly, postponing some of the decisions that we had planned in terms of educational transformation. Then we were gradually able to start the transformation actions and, of course, we accelerated them a lot when we left the pandemic scenario. Here I go to your question. We are promoting an educational transformation that has four main axes. A first axis has to do with the governance change, to change the way the education system is governed. The second has to do with operation of the educational centers themselves, abandoning the centralist model. The third axis is curriculum change: We went from a content approach to one of competition. We were way behind in this and there were even incongruous situations. We, like everyone else, used the tests PISA as a good instrument to assess how we are doing, but the PISA tests are designed in terms of competencies and we were not teaching in terms of competencies. We adjust to what are the prevailing practices in the world.
—Is that where STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) comes in?
—That’s where STEM comes in, among other things. But the last big change at the curricular level is to think about the entire educational journey, from the moment they enter to the end of basic secondary education. We had a very fragmented system and then primary education thought about its study plans and its learning objectives almost without dialogue with what secondary education did. Now we think about all this together and well, we are now beginning to apply it and we are very confident that this will have good results.
—The fourth axis is…?
—Teacher training. In teacher training we have many problems. To begin with, a very low graduation rate. Not in primary education, because by law you need a teacher’s degree to be in front of a group. But in secondary education it is not necessary and we have a very low graduation rate, among other things, because the boys who do teacher training begin to take class hours before finishing their degree and each time they take more class hours and a moment when work beat study and almost without realizing they stopped studying.
—It is paradoxical that teachers abandon the study…
—Interestingly, we have the highest dropout rates in the entire educational system in the area of teacher training. And also other serious mismatches, such as the fact that you could leave with your teaching title after having studied four years knowing practically nothing about Ceibal and without knowing how to use Ceibal’s instruments. To this we must add another problem, which also exists in Argentina, and that is that teacher training is not university-based.
—In addition to an atomization.
—Atomization is the bad face of diversity. Diversity doesn’t bother me, but it does bother me when it’s not in a framework that ensures certain results. Argentina and Uruguay come from the old French normalista tradition. We opted for teachers to follow a very different path from the one followed by those who study Law, Engineering or things like that. This brings a series of problems to our teachers, for example, to continue studying at the university level. We are making a change in teacher training that includes much more convergence with what happens in the classroom. For example, now you have to train yes or yes in all the digital instruments that Ceibal offers and strengthen some basic areas in which we were weak: mother tongue, mathematics. Then we are also changing the entire curriculum and changing the entire structure of the career. And the idea is that at the end of that you come out with a college degree. we try to strengthen and dignify teacher training and at the same time to update it and put it more in tune with how the system works.
—What is the profile of the high school graduate student like?
—First, we are turning towards a competency approach and there are some things that are fundamental to us, such as good command of the mother tongue and a reasonable level of STEAM. Uruguay has many deficits that we share with Argentina: technological training, for example. We have enormous opportunities for growth in the area and we have a training deficit in this area. We are trying to strengthen that. And that at the same time is compatible with training for the exercise of citizenship. One of the worst and most damaging things in the educational debate is what is proposed as an alternative: either I train you to have employment opportunities or I train you to exercise citizenship. So we are fighting that false opposition. The idea is to educate both for the citizenry and for the new generations to take advantage of what is happily a package of opportunities that the world offers today. We live in a world that offers an eighteen-year-old boy many more opportunities for training, work, and entrepreneurship than forty years ago. But it requires you to know more.
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