This weekend the Italian philosopher Nuccio Ordine, the last Princess of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities, passed away, an award that he should have received next October in Oviedo.
A great expert in the Renaissance and in the work of the astronomer and theologian Giordano Bruno, Ordine leaves us as a legacy a great passion for the Humanities, against the current, in a world more concerned with the useful, a category that is applied to education, as he denounced. It meant the beginning of the end of formal education in schools and universities. The first task should be to make our young people understand that the primary objective of education is to become better men and women and, later, with what they have learned, to also be better professionals.
Among his best-known works, “The utility of the useless” values the classics that, among other things, save us from the culture of the ephemeral, ultimately without memory.
The pernicious idea that we have to choose only the activities that produce money makes us worse people. That is why the simple claim of the free, of the apparently useless, of reading a book or admiring a painting is so important. Today, defending the Humanities in this way is defending the future of humanity, and that is more than enough reason for the grateful memory of voices like Nuccio Ordine’s.
2023-06-11 22:06:49
#Editorial #Line #Order #utility #useless
