Reflections

About picking the cutest beans

We walk through the green village. In one house, a very old woman is standing, hunched over a cardboard box in which there are two or three handfuls of very small purple beans. Shakes the box slightly, moves the beans, looks at them carefully, and chooses one to take between the index finger and thumb before transferring it to another, smaller box. “Ask him what she’s doing,” I ask Mati. Without abandoning her hunched posture, she interrupts her work and gives a long explanation. “She’s choosing the cutest ones.” “And how do you know which ones are cuter?” To me, all beans look the same. There’s something I don’t understand. “What do you do with the cutest beans?” “She sows them,” as if the answer were obvious. “The others are for eating.”

Mori Ponsowy

About what it means to be educated today

This discussion leads directly to the problem of whether education simply has to be subservient to the age in which one lives. This is the great question of education: whether education simply accompanies the imperatives of a given era, whether it only serves to adapt to the demands of performance, or whether it is precisely the territory and time through which different eras pass and that knowing means a relationship that weaves the threads between the present and the past so that we have some community power over the future. That the future is not an answer that comes to us from artificial intelligences or techno-feudal information and entertainment companies. In order for the future not to be just a firework, the present has to recover some meaning, some collective ritual, it has to re-establish some existential questions that today are considered banal. If it is not transcendent, the present is at the expense of a completely prefabricated future because it occurs without our participation, without our consensus, without our intervention or decision. The big question today is how we make sense of the educational present again, in these dark times, even if this idea goes in the opposite direction to the assumption that the great architect of education is the future.

Carlos Skliar

About beautiful life and certain challenges

Life is beautiful and it wears out, it goes. But to succeed in life is to start over every time you fall. If there is anger, let them transform it into hope, let them fight for love, do not let yourselves be cajoled by hatred. And, if you get caught by drugs, don’t be left alone because no one is saved alone. The only freedom that exists is in the head and is called will. And if we don’t use it, we are not free. And this must be understood. This challenge is faced by the new generations. Life is so beautiful that it makes no sense to sacrifice it for stupid things.

José Pepe Mujica