To speak, to read, to write, to think

The time has come when everyone will have to decide, in the shadow of AI, whether they want to continue being human?

I will not enter into considering what it means to be human, but I do want to highlight that, without the word, we are not human. There is no trait more dehumanizing than linguistic poverty.

When emphasizing the word, I am thinking of its dimensions: speaking, reading, writing, and thinking.

No one doubts the importance of knowing how to speak with precision, which means having alternatives when it comes to saying something. Wittgenstein maintained, rightly, that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world. A poor vocabulary is an expression of a diminished world. But if speaking well is knowing how to choose between different expressive alternatives (or possible worlds), then (continuing with Wittgenstein), the meaning of a word is, nothing more and nothing less, the extent of its use. My linguistic competence is that of the perimeter of my world. Consequently, the school's main task is the expansion of this perimeter to allow the student to move normally in different contexts. In this sense, every teacher is a language teacher. There is no word in their discipline that cannot serve to expand the student's world. Disciplinary literacy is part of any teacher's task. It is very depressing to hear some teachers say that everything is on the internet.

A child's vocabulary indicates the extent of their world and, as we know, there is no factor in learning more relevant than prior knowledge. They are like the nylon hooks on a strip of velcro. What needs to be learned is like the nylon filaments on the other side of the velcro. It is not hard to understand that the more hooks one has, the easier and more lasting the learning of the new will be. There is, therefore, no useless word at school.

We could continue talking about the importance of nursery rhymes, of teachers who are good storytellers, of the daily use of different verb tenses to be able to refine the nuances of time and the possible, of the need to control the impatience of opinion, of how dialogue is an irreplaceable means to clarify our differences, which, in my opinion, is more relevant than reaching an agreement, etc. Everything is important because the improvement of linguistic competence slows its growth with age.

Understanding a text is only possible if we know how to place it in its context (placing it as the form against the background of prior knowledge related to the subject of said text). The greater the vocabulary, the easier it will be to find the appropriate context for a text.

We cannot overlook prosody (intonation, rhetorical silences, emphasis...) that is experienced with a good reading aloud.

It is sad to see that children's literature has been reducing the length of sentences, perhaps for the same reason that in PISA tests the longer a statement is, the more difficult the resolution of a problem becomes.

Regarding writing, it must be insisted that it is not just a means of transmitting ideas. It is a way of having them and, above all, of ensuring that these ideas are, Cartesianly, clear and distinct. Flaubert rightly said that the art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Learning to write well is a titanic task (perhaps there is no other more difficult one in school), which begins with learning sentence expansion techniques using the tools of conjunctions (“because”, “but”, “although”, “nevertheless”, “consequently”, etc.). It is interesting to highlight that students who have the most difficulty with writing are usually also the ones who have the most difficulty with oral expression.

When we teach the use of subordinate clauses we are teaching how to think and, if there is no thought, there is no rigorous thinking (I prefer to speak of rigorous thinking rather than critical thinking, given that we tend to consider critical the thinking that coincides with our own). If in any domain we should encourage students to take risks, even to be reckless, it is in the exercise of thinking. Prudence is not an intellectual virtue, but it is a fundamental political virtue. That is why there is –or should be– a gap between freedom of thought and freedom of expression. It is the gap of opportunity.

I am increasingly clear that, as every father and every mother knows, to educate is to do what one can and that the greatest enemy of education is neglect (negligence, that is, the “nec-lego”), the lack of ambition for oneself.