Talking about the Gaza conflict in schools is a risky exercise.

TaradilloWe've only just restarted the school year. As teams of teachers, we begin each September with a whole new set of intentions and goals. Sometimes we think and write so much that we leave no room to listen to the identities of the children and young people in front of us or to talk about what's happening beyond the boundaries of the school, in the neighborhood, in the town, in the world.

Sometimes our intentions are overly technical, intellectually unengaged, and we end up being co-responsible for an educational model that is more domesticating than emancipating. We worry more about children reading quickly and understanding a text than about having children and young people with their own criteria, with ideas to say, to write, and to communicate and debate with others.

Noam Chomsky explains this very well in his book (Mis)education (Ed. Crítica). It is a book written in 2001, and already makes references to the topic of Israel in the chapter that he titles Forced silenceTwenty-five years later, conflicts like this one persist and even take on a much larger dimension. Will we begin this new school year without telling our children and young people about what's happening in the Gaza Strip?

We, the teaching teams, are aware that talking about this in schools is a risky exercise. We already saw what happened to our colleagues at the El Palacio Institute in San Andrés de la Barca when they tried to talk about the events of October 1, 2017. I prefer to run the risk of defending myself against accusations of indoctrination than to look into ordinary eyes without seeing the eyes of the children in front of us, teaching locals. I don't want to be a teacher who miseducates, a teacher complicit in what seems like a well-thought-out strategy: an education replete with technique, with teachings aimed at achieving feats or results that are easy to measure and evaluate.

This is nothing new. The teachers at the New School in Ferrière, teachers like Rosa Sensat or Ferrer y Guardia, already told us this when they affirmed that education should be rooted in life.

For all these reasons, it's so painful to read articles and headlines questioning the role of pedagogy as if it were responsible for the mediocrity of education, precisely when it's more urgent than ever to try to build a school that doesn't produce obedient and conformist people. These criticisms could very well be part of the strategy I mentioned earlier.

Educating in critical thinking also involves asking children and young people to justify their ideas and their assertions, accepting that ideas can be modified after hearing the other's point of view. Educating is also believing in the flexibility of their own ideas. We shouldn't be afraid to talk to children and young people about any topic because we can't allow schools and institutes to produce boys and girls afraid to think and challenge their opinions. Young people living in these complex times ask those of us who educate for some insight that will allow them to understand and interpret what's happening.