Opinion | “The Rebellion of the 10”

A teacher in Spain has been charged with five counts considered severe. The reason? Give the highest grade (10) to all his students.

I have long wanted to write about Yván Pozuelo Andrés. A few months ago, I read an article published in El Diario de la Educación in which the journalist Pablo Gutiérrez de Álamo narrates how, since February 2020, a French teacher in Spain has been facing a sanctioning process opened by the Ministry of Education in the Principality of Asturias. The professor, Yván Pozuelo, faces five charges considered grave. The reason? Give the highest grade (10) to all his students.

It all started in 2019 when Yván Pozuelo Andrés, a French professor at the IES Universidad Laboral de Gijón in Spain published a book entitled ¿Negreros o docentes? La rebelión del 10 (Slaves or Teachers? The Rebellion of the 10) (Sapere Aude, 2019). After publishing his book, Pozuelo granted an interview to the newspaper El Comercio in which he explained what led him to write it and his reflections on a tricky topic: assessment. “I thought I was a professor who teaches, and I realized that what I was doing was selecting people,” the professor said in the interview. That is why he decided to abandon his “role as a vigilante.” Instead, he adopted a project-based learning approach and rates all his students with a 10 (the maximum grade), which, until February 2020, he had been doing for more than 14 years without any colleague, student, family member, or manager complaining.

If he had been working with this approach for more than 14 years and giving the highest grade “to all those who work it,” why did they wait until now to sanction him? What happened? Well, some people who read the interview were offended by the professor’s statements. According to the group De Aula a Aula, which has opened a petition in change.org to stop the process against Yván, a “person with high responsibility” within the Ministry of Education of the Principality of Asturias, who read that interview, ordered to process ex officio a file on Yván Pozuelo for the opinions that appeared in it. That is how the inquisitive and harassing process against Yván began.

Several months have passed since I heard about his story. The commentary I wanted to write about it remained in the inkwell. It was not until this week that, thanks to an article by the journalist Marta Aguirregomezcorta, I was reunited with Yvan and his “rebellion of the 10.” Aguirregomezcorta takes up this story, reporting that the sanctioning process began more than twenty-one months (and 1,500 file pages) later. This month the Ministry has finally sanctioned him with eight months of suspended employment and salary. Although Pozuelo has appealed the sanction and continues to work, it can still be made effective in the coming days.

One would think that news like this would be all over social media, the press, and even television. I am surprised by the small number of publications that have reported it. Of course, if it were not for the publications mentioned above, I would not be writing these lines, but, frankly, the coverage of this news has been insufficient. The release of a new video game receives more media coverage than a story like this. And I can assure you of this because, in my work,  I monitor more than 600 specialized sources in education weekly.

It comes to my attention that some of the few media that have covered this news mention the professor’s “credentials” at the outset (he studied at the Sorbonne University in Paris and has a doctorate in History) as if this somehow justified his actions. Would it be different if Pozuelo did not have a Ph.D. or not studied at a prestigious university? Isn’t the deliberate mention of his “merits” goes totally against the struggle he has undertaken and for which he has been sanctioned?

And what is his fight? It is not about giving everyone A+ because, yes, what Yván proposes to the teaching community is to realize that we live in a “world overwhelmed by the evaluation frenzy” that generates not only anguish and stress in the students but also fosters a culture of individuality, competitiveness, and selectivity. All the people who have ever been students have lived that anguish, that competitiveness among classmates, the terrible comparison and envy that it can generate, and its consequent traumas. Writing these lines, I remembered when I was a student. At school, I was an “outstanding student,” a nerd, but I still recall the competitiveness and individuality breathed in the classrooms. I was one of those students who did everything possible so that my classmates did not copy my answers, and for what? What did I gain from this? I’m not proud of my behavior, quite the contrary, but that was the school culture I experienced, and it is still like that. Little has changed.

What do we gain from this “evaluation frenzy”? A student on TikTok also reflects on this in a video arguing why schools should allow students to take exams in groups and not individually. Exams, says the student, “punish people for not being perfect.” When they fail an exam, the blame lies entirely with the individual. “And we teach this to children.”

“Why are we still doing exams?” School is traumatizing, says @k_law_creates. And it is precisely for this reason that Yván Pozuelo encourages the teaching community to undertake a “rebellion of the 10” to create, instead, an environment of trust in the classroom, not of oppression based on the “threat of grades.” Pozuelo advocates creating a learning environment where progress is valued more than effort: “If a student progresses, he deserves the highest grade.”

Yván Pozuelo’s fight continues, but he is not alone. More and more teachers, colleagues, students, and people, in general, are joining the campaign “I Also Am 10” in defense of Yvan and inclusive education.

Translation by Daniel Wetta

Disclaimer: This is an Op-ed article. The viewpoints expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints, and official policies of Tecnológico de Monterrey.

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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0