The 2006 PISA report is a tribute to the success of Spanish regional and national governments and teaching unions in maintaining high levels of popular illiteracy and innumeracy–one wonders how many new property owners understood anything of the mortgages they contracted during the construction boom; see also ADN, which believes there’s a 1 in 20 chance of winning on the Christmas lottery–but it’s still a shock to find books worth a considerable sum of money left out with household rubbish during a nearby flat clearance.

There are various juicy first editions from between 1945 and 1970, when most purchases seem to have taken place, but much is older, and the prize is the 1775 edition of Feijoó’s marvellous Teatro crítico universal (which isn’t about theatre at all). Even if you can’t understand the contents, the concept of { leather-bound books = money = good } surely can’t be that difficult. Or maybe the strippers had contemplated the essay in Vol 1, which concludes that “The Golden Age passed without gold, and for this reason was golden, which is to say, happy, and fortunate.”

[One has to admire the Putin machine's take on PISA: Illiterate Children Invade Russian Schools. The Spanish government has just blamed parents, which doesn't seem hugely smart in the runup to elections.]

Categories: Decline, Languages, Les bourgeois, Mathematics

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