Facts alone are never enough. Facts rarely ifever have any soul. In writing or trying to understand history one may have all manner of "data," and miss the point. One can have all the facts and miss the truth. It can be like the old piano teacher's lament to her student, "I hear all the notes, but I hear no music".
Diagnóstico y reforma de la educación general en España, por Víctor Pérez-Díaz y Juan Carlos Rodríguez. 2011.
El objeto de este informe es llevar a cabo un análisis del sistema de educación general español con vistas a señalar sus limitaciones y sugerir medidas para superarlas. Dos precisiones son necesarias para delimitar ese objeto. Primero, por “educación general” entendemos los niveles de Primaria (y hasta cierto punto Infantil), Educación Secundaria Obligatoria y Bachillerato. Por “educación” entendemos aquí no la educación en su sentido amplio, y más genuino, es decir, la “educación integral” de la persona, de su inteligencia y de su carácter moral, sino, meramente, la educación en tanto que “instrucción escolar”.
Time on task and school attainment, by Daniel Kutner and Lucas Gortazar.
The strongest finding concerns the effect of extended time on disadvantaged groups’ academic performance. Almost all studies found that children of poor families, single parents, and immigrants, as well as all girls, benefit disproportionately from more time in school.
[...]
In any case, the costs would not be homogenous across regions, groups and ages. There is a need to study if other interventions can be more beneficial for certain cases.
[...]
Most specialists have pointed out that increased time with no attention to quality of education is bound to fail. It is unlikely that a school that has poor results would show significant improvements only by adding more classroom hours.
Towards the end of poverty, in The Economist.
Many Westerners have reacted to recession by seeking to constrain markets and roll globalisation back in their own countries, and they want to export these ideas to the developing world, too. It does not need such advice. It is doing quite nicely, largely thanks to the same economic principles that helped the developed world grow rich and could pull the poorest of the poor out of destitution.
Diez grandes mitos sobre el presunto 'fraude' de las preferentes, por Manuel Llamas.
1. "Las preferentes son un producto nuevo"
Falso. La comercialización de instrumentos híbridos comenzó, de manera apreciable, a finales de los 90; la mayoría fueron emitidos por entidades de crédito, pero también por empresas industriales; se vendieron tanto a inversores institucionales como a particulares; desde enero de 1998 hasta diciembre de 2012 se realizaron un total de 461 emisiones, con un importe total de 115.283 millones de euros y más de 3 millones de suscriptores (inversores).
