If today we were to ask political leaders why we want education, I have the feeling they wouldn't know what to answer. It is terrible because, as was seen with the Pope's visit, when there is a void, someone immediately rushes to take advantage of it. Politicians and educators began to prey on a millennial tradition and we have arrived at today's disaster, in a spiral of degradation that has eaten away at education to the core.A few days ago, the librarians' demonstration joined that of the teaching staff, and any day now the doctors will join them. Of these three incarnations of humanism, education is the central pillar, because it indicates the degree of responsibility in the transmission of a heritage. It's like having children: why do you want them if you don't believe in life? As always, someone rushes to fill this void, and now we find ourselves in a full-blown race towards the algorithmic man, who delegates his responsibility to artificial intelligence. Not so long ago, we still opposed on principle being replaced by robots, and it frightened us.For a time, it seemed that humanism could take refuge in books. But even from books it can be driven out. Libraries could have taken over from institutes as cultural centers for each city. Despite having been the apple of humanism's eye (or the confidence in the future), they have ended up suffering the same process of degradation.
And they have started to go on strike, which I look at with as much sympathy as the teachers' strikes because they demand the same thing, to reverse the degradation of recent decades. They ask for labor conditions to be unified, which now depend on the chance of each town hall. They ask for salary updates and decent working hours. They ask to be freed from bureaucracy, that child of hypocrisy that grows like a poisonous weed in the gaps left by irresponsibility. They ask for the Public Reading Map, which determines the characteristics of each library, to be updated, and it has not been updated since 2014. They ask for libraries to be treated with the respect they deserve and for it not to happen as with education, preyed upon by outside interests.When my librarian tells me that she finds users who ask her to help them with their taxes or that she sometimes has to call the municipal police for misconduct at the library, I realize that, in all professions, the inattention and lack of respect from superiors spreads downwards. There is a manifesto from Libraries in Struggle that can be signed online to support these demands. I have already done so.
