Millions of young people around the world will never read Dostoyevsky or Kafka, much less Aristotle’s Poetics, so they will probably never come to know the term agnition – the transition from ignorance to knowledge – and not even arbitrariness, like the one that operates in the condemnation of citizen Joseph K. despite the absence of crime.
Read more Let them govern now
Those young people will find work, maybe as a programmer or marketing manager, and will continue consuming whatever is served to them on the hot grill of social networks, feeling well informed by pumped-up YouTubers, but their judgment will be formed without scaffolding. In Quillette, a magazine that stirs ideas from Australia, they headline: “Literary studies without literature.” Because Duras, Yourcenar, or Woolf have already been replaced by brief readings on global disorder, from climate change to bullying. Bringing the conversation to classrooms by emptying it of old-fashioned things, that is the spirit.
Duras or Woolf have already been replaced by brief readings on global disorder
In Spain, only two out of every hundred young people are able to read Proust or Borges and identify the ironic charge of their pages. The remaining 98, according to the latest PISA report, are unable to infer ideas that the text does not literally express. And, even if they fail, they will pass the course because the law encourages valuing attitude more than knowledge, commitment more than spelling. Thus, they will grow up writing osea as one word, just like enserio, because haber que pasa.
Read more What starts badly…
The PISA issue reflects our resignation from learning, as well as the devaluation of culture, which is heading down its path as a decorative artifact. However, two students out of a hundred have felt the miracle of finding in a book what they were looking for without knowing it. They have discovered a new meaning of living, whether in love, guilt, or anguish. Of course, there are those two young people who, lucid and rigorous, will end up pushing carts of ideas, spreading them on their channels despite the noise, like David against Goliath. But that overwhelming responsibility should not fall on them, but on adults who, unlike patient Asian parents, do not sit close to their children when they do their homework. Poor overworked adults, glued to their phones and in intermittent therapy who also write osea!
Read more “Well, very well, then goodbye”
