Education emptied of God

“Everything is full of gods.”. A Thales of Miletus, The tradition attributes the quote with which this reflection on the educational misery that has been surrounding us for too long in Spain to the one of the theorem. Given that Thales happens to be one of the first thinkers worthy of the name, perhaps we should not lose sight of his words, in case they can help us to understand what is wrong with us and if, from what is wrong with us, we can find a clue that leads us to its remedy.

In fact, when I reflect on what occupies a large part of my daily chores, three experiences come to mind which, as we shall see, can give us some clue to explain the enormous void felt in Spanish schools. Because, sad to say, the academic failure echoed by all the international organizations dedicated to measuring the results of educational systems -a failure that those of us who have lived in this biotope for more than forty years know first hand- is nothing more than the symptom of an amorphous chaos, of the aimless ship that the Spanish school has become. In reality, they are two experiences and a sublimated lyrical experience. I will begin with the latter.

An Italian song

In one of the stanzas of the great song Azzurro (1966), made famous by the singer Adriano Celentano in 1968 -but whose lyrics were written by Vito Pallavicini-, the lover protagonist of the story declares that his present melancholy reminded him of when as a child he had to stay in the schoolyard during the summer; and he adds the following textually: “now I'm more bored than I was then and I don't even have a priest to chat with.”. It is significant that one of the elements that filled the space and time of the school was the presence of a priest. 

A lost closeness

The second scene, this time a personal experience, takes us back to September 1983. I had just landed in my first assignment as a professor of Latin. Perhaps the term landing is not the most appropriate one, since it was not exactly the most practical way to get to Alcañiz, in the province of Teruel, by plane. The high school was then called Cardenal Ram. It was a small institute for the boys of Alcañiz and its region who were interested and had the qualities to have a classical academic formation that would allow them to follow higher studies at the University. There was another center for vocational training. Years after I passed through there, they unified them; and, naturally, the resulting institute lost the cardinal's capelet and, I suppose, any pretension of its students following a classical academic formation. 

The fact is that when I arrived there, among the professors of the cloister there were two young, dynamic priests, with whom I used to argue about the optimal pronunciation of Latin. I used to tell them that the best thing to do was to use the reconstructed pronunciation, the one that would supposedly be heard in the time of Caesar, Cicero, Horace or Virgil. This would honor the era of Rome's greatest political and economic splendor, which was also the era that had produced the greatest harvest of poets, orators and thinkers. They joked and made me see that, if one pronounced the word audivisti (in Spanish you have heard/heard) as I said, it sounded like audigüisqui; and, of course, that whiskey (whisky for Anglophile purists) is not taken through the ears, but through the mouth. 

I must say that those conversations, apparently inconsequential, were not only pleasant, but even educational, since they reflected an endearing reality that was part of the familiar landscape of a school with content and feeling. 

The Church, the heart of education

The third picture belongs to a landscape far away in space, but close to our hearts. It is September 2010. I was with my wife in Nafplio, a small town in the Peloponnese, in the ancient region of the Argolis, which had the honor of being the first capital of Greece to be liberated from the Turkish yoke in 1821. There, as also in Spain, the school year was starting and I had the opportunity to witness in situ the inaugural speech of the director of one of the local ‘liceos’. 

As was customary and as we all do, one would think, in the cardinal points of the civilized world, the director, dressed with due propriety, launched the usual harangue to the students about the benefits of education and how studying was going to benefit them. The boys, as was only natural, paid little attention to him and waited stoically for the end of the speech, which was endearing, essential, memorable, but a speech nonetheless. 

The interesting thing about the scene was that the director in question was flanked by two popes. I found the presence of the priests both comforting and strange. It was comforting, because it must be remembered that Greece and Greek were saved for civilization by the Church, because the popes continued to teach the children the Greek language, so that they could follow their liturgy and know the sacred texts. 

The Church, custodian of education

In parallel to the Western scriptures, where Latin and its intellectual legacy were preserved from barbarism, the Orthodox Church preserved the Greek literary tradition and saved the population from the erasure of its language. 

On the other hand, it is necessary to emphasize that the Renaissance and its recovery of classical excellence was set in motion by pious people who, through the refined study of the texts, wanted to strip the classical and sacred texts of all the inaccuracies that had accumulated due to the passage of time and lack of care. Erasmus and the other humanists, paradoxically, wanted to know exactly the Word of God. That is the reason for fantastic projects such as the Complutensian Polyglot Bible of our Cardinal Cisneros. Education flourished hand in hand with the Church. 

The basic issue

Why did the presence of the two popes at the inauguration of the course in Nafplio seem strange to me? I don't think the reason escapes any Spanish reader. Poor Cardinal Ram had his institute taken away and all the institutes in Spain have had their priests taken away. The last time I shared a cloister with a priest was in Vallecas at the turn of the century.

It could be said, without fear of being mistaken, that education in the Spain of our times -and of our sins- has been emptied of God. In this absence, in this emptiness, perhaps, we could have one of the main causes of the educational ruin that afflicts what is pompously called ‘educational system’, which is full of grandiloquent words, evanescent competences, emerging technologies and impertinent bureaucracy; but, it is empty of cultural tradition, of ideas, of contents, of the familiar Spanish realism, of classical languages... It has been emptied of spirituality. They have taken it out of the axiom of Thales. 

God willing, it will again be filled with all the valuable things bequeathed to us by the three watchtowers of our civilization: Jerusalem, Athens and Rome.