The fact that there are already too many human beings on the planet goes from being a mere theory to becoming a palpable reality the moment we stop having the necessary skills to face it. This is what has started to happen to me lately, or rather, something I’ve started to become aware of. It started in a situation that would seem simple. To take my youngest son to school every morning, I have to walk only a few streets, which are, however, somewhat conflictive. To tell the truth, the problem doesn’t start with them but before, in my bed, where I almost always wake up tired, and also later, when I have to rush my son in his preparations for school. Dawn is not easy. It’s a logistical and emotional problem (my son isn’t as organized or obedient), and by the time I leave the house I’m already an alert animal.
As I said, the school is close, but at the first corner the road separates into five super busy streets; from there a crowd of cars we entered a narrow road full of potholes. Turning in the little street that leads to the school also implies care, due to its narrowness. Walking the three hundred meters that separate me from the hall where I leave my son, is the last challenge: in this final stretch, the fathers and mothers of families have had to learn to be considerate of each other (those who go with those who come and vice versa ), since the road is not only narrow, but the residents leave their cars and trucks parked in the street, and sometimes even their trucks. In these dazed hours, I can’t help but think that they do it on purpose, resentful of the traffic that families from the surrounding schools cause.
Convince me that it is not so, it is not easy. The garbage truck passes, people cross with their boats, one must be attentive to the other cars, because the passage has been reduced to a single lane. Almost all of the moms and dads who circulate around know that those of us who are arriving to drop off our children are in a greater hurry than those who are leaving, and we give way to each other according to the traffic’s convenience. Many of us thank each other with a gesture, making out behind the glass the faces of strangers who wave their fingers and sometimes smile. And so it is the same with the return, after each one has left our son, to whom one has said goodbye, giving them the last instructions for school. Anyway, my return home is more rested, although not enough to make me forget my next obligations, which will start soon.
It was in one of these days when I realized ─and I began to live in my own flesh─ that we are already too many human beings on the planet. To understand it better, it must be considered that not everything is reduced to the preparations to leave the house and the traffic on the road. Leaving aside my dreams of that night, which could have been sad or scary; Leaving aside the lawsuit I have with my brother as well as the memory of old breakups with friends, which still haunt me at times; Leaving aside even (at least in theory) the economic hardship of those days… Leaving that aside, there is something that is clear: I am a modern and lively man subjected to an overload of information that, deep down, is nothing but a manifestation of that great amount of human beings who inhabit the world and from whom I receive influence in one way or another on a daily basis. I cannot deny that I am overwhelmed by the ghost of so many people with whom my life is intertwined, to begin with because I am part of a society in crisis (even worse, at war in a certain strategic region of the planet), and because I carry all of this on my head despite the fact that for a long time I have refused to listen to the news every day and that I have stopped going on and on and on and on Facebook.
Here a second part of this text opens to ask me if it would not be better for me to watch the news and also be aware of what is happening in the world (including the emotional world of social networks), precisely because of what I affirm at the beginning of this article, namely, that the true weight of reality becomes palpable at the moment when our abilities to face it are no longer sufficient. Being aware of what is happening in the newspapers and on social networks, wouldn’t it be important to know the monster I’m up against? Is it enough to perceive it, even slightly, in the daily bustle and in feeling “engaged” almost all the time?
Perhaps the reader has many more skills than me to take up the challenge; or maybe not, and it does help him to know that there are others like him in this world, full of old and new loads for which they are not prepared. Peter Jarvis, the English pedagogue, for many years has been given the task of reminding us that contemporary humans are subjected to great pressures that force us to learn and learn all the time. We live second by second acquiring new skills to handle challenges (from those apparently as simple as turning on a hyper-traveled neighborhood street).
Now I understand (yes, it suddenly becomes crystal clear to me!) why in the new pedagogical treatises the old words we used to refer to school objectives (education, training, coexistence) have been transformed into much more technical terms, that despite their functionalist tone seem wrapped in an archaic sound: talking about skill development, skills y Skills It has always sounded to me like “using tricks and tricks” to survive in an inhospitable environment. I talk about this and I imagine the first a wise man learning to flee, terrified of deadly things that move slowly through the undergrowth; a wise man wielding burning sticks and brandishing them against a beast, waiting for it to be distracted so we can all jump on it together… The truth is that I don’t know much about our ancestors, but I imagine that they were, beings developing abilities and skills to survive in a world overpopulated with menacing beings. Eating skills to choose between food and poisons (this, after having witnessed some plants make a friend writhe in pain, and vomit and turn pale, and stop moving); skills when going to bed, sleeping, waking up… Survival skills.
In today’s world there is no time for the education that we wanted before, that is, one in which values and forms of behavior are transmitted at a pace according to each person. Now we have to want other things, more appropriate with a world that requires us to learn at full speed, all the time, most of the time by ourselves and without being able to wait for family members and teachers to transmit truths to us slowly so that let’s understand them.
Now, human beings must always be alert (for example, it’s barely ten in the morning and I’m already talking about all this!).
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The third and last part of this text takes up the central idea of this series of articles on The education we want, that is, to freely express my wishes regarding education, regardless of whether or not they are achievable. Finally I am in utopian territory and everything is allowed to me (of course, as long as it arises from a real desire, from a to want TRUE).
So I ask myself: what would I want education to be like in this overcrowded world that I face on a daily basis? An essential tool to guide the response is the call actor-observer asymmetry, a concept used by both psychology and ethics, and whose role is central to understanding both human difficulties (physical and metaphysical) and why they are exacerbated in certain circumstances, for example, there are too many humans on the planet. The importance of this concept should place it among the main ones in our investigations, and instead we see it relegated to the bottom drawer, where the less important ones abound and also the oldest but never resolved.
Before describing it, I want to invite anyone who does not see themselves reflected in it to cast the first stone. In its current version, it is described more or less like this: human beings judge ourselves always taking contextual factors into account (“I did it because…”), and on the other hand, when judging other human beings, we do not take these factors into account and we simply condemn their actions by attributing them to internal conditions, such as malice, selfishness, ignorance, “stupidity,” and such generalizations. In other words, we blame others for things that we excuse in ourselves; In my example (taking my son to school), this attitude is expressed when I honk my horn for the driver in front to move forward, and I yell profanity at the one who honks my horn; taken to the extreme, the actor-observer asymmetry he convinces the tyrant that if we all listen to him, we will do better. In an overcrowded world, horn blasts become the everyday language, and tyranny is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
An education that helps us correct this asymmetry would be highly desirable. It is about learning that begins by limiting myself and by expanding the place that I give to the other. And it is that, one of two: either there is not always a justification for my actions, or there is also one for the acts of others; Either we are not the center of the world, or the others are too (“Each person is a center,” says the educator Francoise Doltó, who also thinks that communication is the human mission in this world).
Thus, it is clear to me that when faced with the saturation of the living space, the solution is not the old equation “Take it off so I can put it on” but another infinitely more appropriate but also more difficult one. In the school that I want it will be called Basic equation of human coexistence, which is very simple: «When there is no space outside, you have to open space inside», Teachers will be able to explain it like this: «In order for all of us to fit in the world, we must give others a place within us». And they will be able to conclude: «It is called love to neighbor, but it is long to understand, and its practice requires daily training. We’ll save it for the next class!”
This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license
