In a letter to Louise Collet, Flaubert said: “I do not write for today’s reader, but for the readers who will appear while the language lives”. This sentence makes us think about the contemporary conditions of language use and about the emergence of a possible death. “While the language lives” means, precisely, that it can die. If language dies, the ability to represent the world and express it also ends. Language can die if it is reduced to a mere means of communication. That is why we must study literature. Reading literature and talking about it allows us to incorporate the great richness of the language’s words and to know from within its extraordinary metaphorical and metonymic plasticity. And precisely because language is alive and can die, we love it with an absolute love, with the tenderness that its precarious and fragile condition requires. Thanks to the intimate relationship with words, the things of the world become present: great writers make us realize the possibility of creating other possible worlds. To do this we need words. One alone is not enough.
These days, a video has circulated on social media asking young people, at the entrance to the Education Fair, what the mountain range separating Catalonia from France is called. Most of those surveyed did not know. One girl says “Pyrenees” when the interviewer gives her a clue: “It starts with P”. This video is appalling. Once again, we find that respectful education and competency-based logic alone do not lead to the acquisition of basic knowledge. The question is about geography, not “knowledge of the environment”. It is called geography and it is an essential field of knowledge for leaving school with a foundation. Why is geography not studied in school, and instead, fundamental knowledge is hidden under a hybrid heading like “knowledge of the environment”? What environment do these boys and girls know other than video games or TikTok? Until this is rethought, we will remain stuck in the deepest pedagogical disorientation. However, most of the boys and girls in the video do not understand the question because they do not know the meaning of the word mountain range. Some dare to ask the interviewer what a mountain range is. Perhaps if they had asked these boys and girls what Coolkid is, they would have answered correctly? Meanwhile, today in schools, emotional education is practiced: emotions are taught to be expressed with a single word, reducing language to sign language. On the other hand, in teacher training faculties, no content is taught and very little is read. This is a very serious mistake. Words make a world exist. Without words, there is no world beyond the emoji. Instead of doing masters in specific didactics to alleviate the problems of the wrongly called educational “level”, we should make them study, simultaneously, a teaching degree and a first cycle of university in which fundamental content would include language, literature, science, and technology. Only then can we increase the possibilities for the language to live.
