The school for life

Abstract

The school for life is founded on ethical credibility, on consistent, socially and planetaryly sensitive action. In contrast, current education contradicts the most important objectives that compel it to develop actions in favor of life, with respect and esteem for diversity and evolutionary dynamics. It leaves aside the knowledge, feelings and doings that embrace the earth; it is embedded in “the routine, the inertia, the atomization of individuals ... it makes us live ‘on loan’, without an anchor point that gives consistency to our life (Ortega, op cit).

Educating for life requires the orientation of scenarios to affirm the pluridiversity of life, which requires recognizing and dignifying territories as an interrelated complex of land, bodies, spiritualities, worldviews and diverse cultures. Where educational agents are empathetic with others and live the experience of knowing how to be another, of welcoming the other in otherness. At this point, education must promote the development of co-reasoning performances, of sentient reason, that connect the learner with life so that he learns and thinks by living, that is, understands, and feels the understandings. Thus, he/she will be able to use the knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, abilities, knowledge and its applications in an edifying way, with a sense of life, in a sentient way, that allows him/her to do, or know how to be a witness, work of life, honor, care, nourish life. 

In this sense, the educational system requires projects and pedagogical processes sensitive to existence and life; positions and assumptions that give a relevant place to the development of understanding, that make it a style of educating and educating, of forming and training, but that go beyond information and flat application of knowledge and knowledge, and cognitive and conceptual understanding. Overcome the vision of training to use their potentials in environments that finally accelerate and atomize life under the syntagma on which navigates the development of competencies in the educational world and economic, technological and scientific productivity.

Education for life must be built on comprehensive syntagmas, but embracing life, with an ethical, uplifting, sense of other, and supported by criteria such as credibility, consistent with the size of the coherent actions that the agents have to deploy. A formation in ethical credibility, which seeks to truly form socially and planetaryly responsible beings with themselves, with the other and the other that requires the care of life. Because according to Ortega, humans are always indebted to the other, and we can never talk about living with a clear conscience, because “... in the ethical relationship with the other there can be no tranquility of conscience in the fear of not having been responsible enough with him” (Ortega and Romero, 2022, p. 241). 

An educational and pedagogical vision and action is needed that includes anthropology as a device to face the social drama that encompasses education, “marked by indifference and social coldness, individualism, the desertion of young generations from public institutions, the loss of influence of the family and the school in the socialization and education of adolescents and young people” (Ortega, 2022). In line with the sensitive commitment to “order” citizen coexistence, public institutions must develop pedagogical projects of anthropological and ethical basis, being references for this the pedagogy of otherness and similar of an edifying nature. Such development raises the credibility of the institutions and actors involved in social and cultural training and practices. Indeed, the credibility of the school is expressed, among other facts, in the action of its teachers. From a pedagogical perspective that emphasizes exemplarity, the fact of being a witness of formation for life -- the attitude of ethical commitment to life, of responsibility with oneself, with the other and with the other -- constitutes a performance of understanding-action that would configure educational agents as referents of ethical experience in the face of the function of educating and the most meaningful principles that all educational activity must endure.

Life is a network of relationships. The flow of life runs parallel with conservation, that is, with the systematic non-alteration of the cycles and transitions of evolution; this is a condition for a good life, or if you prefer, for a “tasty” life. The human being must learn to know how to be part of the vital pluriverse, of the interdependent interweaving of human and non-human worlds; its productive and generative activity – science in its diversity and the way of assuming it – is transcendental for this. Perhaps we need, in this way, an ethical credibility inherent in the ways of knowing, teaching and forming in otherness, of an edifying comprehensive learning that lasts a lifetime. Because the expression “edifying understanding” is a saying doing, or better, more than a saying, does, it is a doing, and not just any doing: it is a knowing how to become better being of the interrelated complex of which it is part. This is the need to rethink with a comprehensive edifying, civilizational mentality, the conceptualizations and contemporary educational practices (Arboleda, 2020).

It is urgent to educate in the formation, as early as possible and in a non-invasive or indoctrinating way, of awareness of otherness and otherness, of common life; that exercises the student in the act of thinking, of using mental operations, representations and strategies to proceed in life, enhancing it. Perhaps, this allows to build a greater sense of life, in the key of acting, sentient, edifying consciousness, for the care of oneself, the other and the other. That would be a school for life, for the respect and care of life; a welcoming and esteemed school, habitat of sentient thought, of edifying understanding, instead of dismissing consciousness, or of estimating an exclusive, centered consciousness and thought that ignore either otherness or individuality. A challenge, otherwise countercultural, intense.