Classes began, and we return to analyze education. Beyond the teaching methods and the specialties to be taught, the purpose of this note is to reflect on the values and objectives of education. We must emphasize that a better education depends not only on the study plan and the qualities of the educator, but also on the student’s willingness to learn, his application and discipline.
To educate is to help someone become what they are capable of being. Seen in this way, education should not be an instrument of domination or indoctrination, but quite the opposite, because it is, in essence, the instrument of man’s liberation.
For this reason, the demand of the teacher or the professor to the student is not an imposition, but a right: the right to demand to be demanded, so that each one gives the best of himself, because we are born human, but to be people.
It has been said and repeated that education is the best instrument for social equality, because civil rights can only be exercised by cultured and educated peoples; if not, they will be used and dominated by the rulers. In this sense, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento said that education is a responsibility of societies and governments, “by charity or by obligation.”
If governments and societies do not commit to a system of educational quality, they will be creating a generation of orphans (because they are unprotected).
Argentine school education was at the head of all America, and today we have lost that place. The educational methods and the discipline imposed on the students, which allowed excellent results in the formation of the Argentine people, should not be disqualified, despising them for being “traditional”, as if the sum of knowledge and experience acquired through history did not constitute “knowledge”.
It was Aristotle who discovered that logic was composed from two possibilities, the “true” and the “false”, combined to infinity, to realize that if it were not for this concept, which is linked to the binary system, today we would not have computers or computer systems. And it was he himself who gave the best definition of what it is to know, when he said that “knowledge is power.” Because who does not know cannot or command.
In short, in what each one does, they must perfect themselves, be it in science, art, profession or trade, always studying and learning. If not, you will have no future, and the absence of a future is equal to a meaningless life.
* Lawyer specialized in economics