Territorializing education

the epistemology of similarities and discrepancies between the Cuscatlán Educational Plan and the PISA test

Abstract

This paper aims to point out the similarities and discrepancies between the educational strategies contained in the National Educational Plan-Cuscatlán Plan of El Salvador and the methodology for applying the PISA Test as an instrument for measuring the state of education in the territories. Along these lines, this paper offers some reflections on what could be considered serious methodological and methodological limitations of the PISA test, referring to its universalization of the concept of territory without considering its particularities and singularities. However, despite its potential theoretical and methodological limitations and its philosophical inductivism, which fails to recognize the differences and diversity of the spheres of history, culture, and material and intellectual production within a single human configuration, the PISA test confirms the importance and imperative need to address the problems of school education from a territorial perspective. This latter aspect is precisely its coincidence with the Cuscatlán Educational Plan of El Salvador (Ticas, 2019), which consists of understanding the urgent need to territorialize education. Thus, this work exposes the main methodological limitation of the test’s empirical treatment of territory as a unity and complete representation of diversity; in reality, this unity does not represent diversity or the particularities and singularities of each territory. Assuming educational homogeneity even within a single territorial, historical, or cultural unit only results in the clearest positivist limitation of universalizing particularities and singularities. T hus, the PISA test assumes that the universality of a territory becomes a homogeneous determinant of it, thereby demonstrating the positivist nature of creating general laws for particular identities and entities. It is precisely along these lines that the discrepancies between the PISA test and the Cuscatlán Educational Plan arise.