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.

Those of us dedicated to university teaching continue to wonder what the competitive advantage of the human being who teaches is compared to a kind and gentle, all-encompassing artificial intelligence. Our worries and shortcomings are largely covered by the superpowerful capacity of this dancing universe of millions of data points.

On November 4th, a drunken, clumsy man assaulted Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico, during a walk through the capital. The president filed a complaint with the Attorney General's Office to set an example that this type of behavior is more than unacceptable: "It's a crime, and if I don't file a complaint, what becomes of all Mexican women?" In a press conference, Sheinbaum proposed reviewing whether sexual harassment in public spaces should be considered a criminal offense. It seems that important women—and here she uses "important" to clarify that they not only wield power but also symbolically embody a series of shared values, such as freedom and mutual respect—must confront this type of violence far too often.

"This was and was not, have a good trip, goldfinch..." The velvety tone of the language spreads soundlessly throughout the classroom. The children's ears open, ready to receive the melody. They are the teacher-grandmothers who revive stories, a project by Rosa Sensat promoted by retired teachers, who travel throughout Catalonia explaining stories, myths, and legends in schools. A magnificent group, made up of dales, speakers of ancestral voices who defend the bare bones of orality. They don't use those modern-day rampoines called that: supports. They don't use text or illustrations, and needless to say, screens. Just voice and gesture. The narration, then, becomes fluid and full of cadences. The power of the language alone is felt, filled with couplets and tongue twisters. The oral transmission of myths and stories connects children to our tradition and brings them into contact with an exceptionally beautiful Catalan language, which these teacher-grandmothers know inside and out.

In the first chapter of Catalan nationality (1906), Enric Prat de la Riba warns against the danger of becoming a province, otherwise, there is a risk of losing one's own personality by submitting to the criteria and motto of others: "Chosen souls always preserved the memory of the past and maintained a passive protest against the present, but they passed silently, isolated, and in silence, and isolated, and in silence, isolated, and in silence; the reflective conscience of the community was erased, leaving only, with special accentuation, the same unconscious feeling of the masses."

The resumption of work and school activities is approaching. Sant's Day, we're back! With the joy of reunion, many conversations begin with the question: "And you, where did you go on vacation?" This is a dreaded question for those who haven't left home. A bit lazy, they are forced to say: nowhere. Vacation is a time of leisure and rest, but it is also, above all, a place, a different geographical space, where you can go for a change of scenery and forget the work routine (or the work that causes suffering). Some people take advantage of it to see the world (Bali, Burma), others go on an excursion through Ripollès, and others go to the beach for a few days with a gang of friends. Everyone goes out, of course, but this going out, what human direction does it take? They can be strangers, visitors, and—worst of all—tourists. Tourists are predators, exploiters of places. The outsider looks at it from the outside (hence the word); he doesn't seek to understand what he sees or delve deeper: he merely passes by for a while. The visitor, on the other hand, sometimes tries to empathize, but only for a few hours. In all three cases, the place isn't experienced from within. Going, one goes on vacation, but one rarely experiences it in the sense of being, because it would mean wanting to stay, it would mean a certain immobility and also a certain availability. A place is something transitory, temporary. It's the opposite of territory. Territory comes from the earth. Roots are put down in the earth. Exploring a territory is much more than taking a tour, like these tourists happily perched on the tour bus with their sunglasses on their noses. What kind of city can you explore from the second floor of a tour bus? Well, you can explore a place, but territory is something very different. Now that people are going back home, that's their territory, because it's where, for better or worse, they've sunk their roots. Sometimes we don't like the place we come from, or the place where we've made a life, because it jars us a bit. But it's our territory. A territory can also be mental or spiritual: it's the symbolic space we remember, we once inhabited inside, and it inhabits us inside.

Leo the interview with the counselor after the botched allocation of places in the Department of Education. To begin with, it must be said that this Catalan word, botched job, is magnificent. Nyap means something unsuccessful, poorly done. It is said in Coromines that botching also means "to seize something violently, or suddenly." Nyap comes from naño, "a wound that someone gets as a result of a blow." All these connotations of something sudden, violent (given how it affects people), poorly done, clumsy, or dented could be applied to the subject of recent headlines.

Once again, recent education headlines have raised the serious problem of student proficiency in Catalonia. Specifically, the math level in sixth grade is the lowest in history, and the difficulties in English in fourth year of compulsory secondary education, although Catalan seems to be on the rise. The Generalitat (Catalan government) also makes headlines by announcing the implementation of additional measures to improve students' science proficiency. Among other measures, it aims to expand teacher training in science teaching to improve the quality of teaching. But what is the cause of the problem of students' low proficiency? It is surely multifactorial. Investing in additional measures means that what has been done so far is not enough. That these measures include teaching methods to help teachers improve their proficiency also presupposes that they are not doing well. This is debatable, because these same teachers have been validated by the same administration that now proposes teaching them more method. However, no one proposes a different perspective that would allow us to turn things around. If the problem is knowledge, why reinforce teaching methods? Here I go. The key to all this is the lack of reflection on content due to an over-emphasis on skills. The logic of skills, this idea of what content is for, this obsession with know-how, ends up being detrimental to knowledge—not all knowledge, but the most important things for being able to navigate in a world where intelligence has been hijacked by machines. What's the point of knowing how to perform an internet search without knowing if what we've found is correct because we lack the knowledge? The difficulty today is figuring out what fundamental knowledge must be acquired to navigate socially without being fooled. The children really enjoyed one activity, but what did they learn? It's not about raising competent children, capable of applying knowledge, but rather educated, cultured children, curious to know things—not precisely the things that circulate on the networks, but those that have shaped culture. Instead of teaching how to use AI from the outset, we should be taught the background of AI, how it was invented, who invented it, how it was invented, and, above all, why. Instead of teaching English by playing a video game, we should teach the English that Virginia Woolf wrote. Precisely because it has no application, none at all, other than to make English say things we wouldn't have imagined in other languages.

On the occasion of the 2025 graduation ceremonies, the current Harvard pastor said the following: "My hope for you is that you continue to be comfortable with being uncomfortable [stay comfortable being uncomfortable]". What does this phrase mean in the context of the cultural battle between Harvard and the Donald Trump administration, and what lessons can we draw for our region?stay": to remain in discomfort, that is, in the debate of ideas, doubt, and speaking. This tendency of university culture, so difficult to carry out when society experiences a radical polarization that sometimes makes any possibility impossible, not to say of dialogue, but of listening to what we would not like to feel, but today clashes with the positions of democratic societies through the agencies designated for this purpose. On the one hand, extreme right-wing positions, both in Europe and the United States, defend the purity of a supposed truth that must be established with other points of view. Students take note of everything the professor says, even if it fools them; they become cannon fodder for any slogan posed as a guarantee of security. Trump hates Harvard because it represents the best thinking leaders, not precisely the richest but the smartest, in the sense, in this case, of someone who wants to talk to those who think differently, to compare perspectives even if it hurts. of that world, but of what must come and that depends on our responsibility.

Teachers are pondering what to do in the face of the emergence of artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, and other devices that have quickly become a kind of phantom arm for students who are increasingly distracted and inattentive, unable to grasp a single stimulus. A simple explanation or a written paragraph-length instruction becomes difficult to assimilate. The impact on attention span and concentration is very evident. Sometimes I think we should conduct memory workshops, like those offered by people suffering from Alzheimer's when they attend day centers. It's astonishing and worrying. The mechanisms for acquiring knowledge and the way we learn have changed to such extremes that it's hard to identify. Keeping the electronic device open while things are happening in the classroom (debates, presentations, collaborative work) has become an automatic habit, without which we seem to lose our bearings. ChatGPT has become a teaching assistant: it explains what they haven't understood in class with the synchronous teacher. It also helps with completing assignments. It replaces reading an article with a summary of the main ideas. Proposes developing topics, prepares presentations.

The Integrated University Information System (SIIU) publishes figures on student grades at the end of high school across Spain. From 2015 to 2023, the number of Catalan students completing high school with an excellent grade—an average of between 9 and 10—has increased by four points. Catalonia is one of the three regions that gives the least excellent grades to students., along with Navarre and the Balearic Islands. This data is part of a statistic that needs to be interpreted. Does this mean that in Catalonia, fewer excellent students are awarded compared to other regions because teachers are more demanding?

Michele Serra is a journalist for the Italian newspaper The Republic. On February 22, he published an article on the vindication of Europe, called "Tell me something European!"Regarding a phrase spoken by Mario Draghi, "Do something!" Addressed to the leaders of the member countries of the European Union, Serra raises the issue of so-called "public opinion". In his column, he proposes a shift in the way we understand politics: beyond what the leaders say, it is necessary for citizens to mobilize to speak in terms of Europe, hence the title of the article, "u!" has had a great media impact, even generating a massive demonstration in Rome in defense of the European model.

The issue of psychotropic drug use, particularly among adolescents and young people, is causing concern. This is confirmed by the latest studies, which have been echoed by the ARA, which indicate that "in 2023, the last with definitive government data, more than 1.2 million Catalans received at least one dispensation of antidepressants." Prescriptions among those under fifteen years of age have tripled since 2020. The news also says that these drugs, "roughly speaking