We always make literature: when we order a coffee, we recount our ailments to a doctor, we write an email, we insult (by the way: the low quality of insults nowadays is striking), we make the shopping list, we offer condolences, we declare our eternal or circumstantial love, we scold our child or argue with our partner.Those who wrote electoral messages on the walls in Pompeii ("Vote X") were making literature; those who hastily and eagerly wrote crude poems ("We have peed in bed; truly / we are a disaster. / Do you want the reasons, innkeeper? There was no / chamber pot!"); the romantics ("How I would like to hold your dear arms around my neck and kiss your lips") and the pragmatic merchants of their own bodies ("Hope, yes to everything, nine aces"). Those who confessed their existential concerns ("Once dead, we are nothing") and the composers of meta-graffiti ("It surprises me, oh wall, that you have not yet collapsed under the weight of the foolishness of so many writers").We find literature on the walls of Bilbao ("Violent gays seek revenge. Gay Intifada") or Cordoba ("Hating is for weaklings") or on the Roman wall of Lugo ("Romani ite domum", that is to say, "Romans go home").These graffiti or, if you prefer, these murals are a literary exercise (although not very civic), because they aim to shape an idea to give it the form of an aphorism.It seems that the first graphic representation of Jesus Christ was a graffiti from 200 AD found in the Pedagogium of the Palatine Hill in Rome. With the intention of ridiculing Christianity, it shows Jesus with a huge donkey's head and nailed to the cross. One inscription says: “Alexamenos worships God”. Not far away, in the same building, another inscription says: "Alexamenos is faithful". Perhaps this person is literarily claiming their faith in front of those who have mocked them?When we meet a friend and they ask us how we are doing, we immediately set about artistically modeling our memory to give it the shape of a narrative. In speaking – forgive the expression – we literary. Don't we perhaps spend the day explaining (supposedly) interesting things about ourselves? And isn't a biography the result of our insistence on imposing narratives on the chaos of our existence?Then, and here is where I wanted to get, the understanding we have of ourselves cannot be more accurate than the rigor of the words we use to understand ourselves. Beyond words, there is only darkness and, perhaps, sentimental jam. In the case – highly improbable – that there were a genuine self, a true self, without words it would be mute.

Nick Gibb, the English politician who has reflected most on education, has written one of the most pedagogically stimulating books of this century so far. Reforming lessonsThe book, which bears the subtitle "Why English schools have improved since 2010 and how it was achieved," was published by Gibb. Gibb served as Shadow Education Minister in 2005 and as Education Minister from 2010 to 2012, from 2014 to September 2021, and again from October 2022 to November 2023.

It seems increasingly urgent to provide our students with tools that allow them to differentiate rigorous information from falsehood and to foster critical thinking. The problem is that we do not have infallible tools that save us the effort of thinking. This is why I want to talk about the tree pop of the Pacific Northwest (Pacific Northwest tree octopus).

Teachers are on strike with the astonishing support of the politicians who have been governing Catalan education in recent years. Esther Niubó asserted that this strike "requires the full support of the Catalan government." Teachers' discontent is real, and it's good that it's being acknowledged. But is it understood that the problem cannot be solved by propping up the system with band-aids while simultaneously asking schools to resolve all the issues that social change is bringing to the forefront? These issues affect the relationship between families and schools, the meaning and purpose of knowledge, the status of authority, and ultimately, the role of schools in society.

Caroline de Bendern, a slightly rebellious, bohemian, young English aristocrat whose beauty seemed a synthesis of Jane Birkin's sensuality and Twiggy's androgyny, was just passing by and unwittingly entered history.

Marina Ginestà (1919-2014) was born in Toulouse into a family with a long leftist tradition. Her grandmother, Micaela Chalmeta, a feminist and pioneer of the Catalan cooperative movement, translated The Power of the Market Basket, by Honora Enfield. Her father, Bruno, was a trade unionist, and her mother, Empar, headed the Spanish delegation at the international congress of the women's movement in Moscow in 1935. Marina and her brother, Albert, belonged to the communist youth.

Christmas undoubtedly has many good, even endearing, aspects. I'm a firm believer in its traditions. However, it's undeniable that this time of year puts us through a family stress test, because when we have to love each other intensely in a confined space, the difficulties porcupines face in keeping each other warm without hurting themselves on their quills quickly become apparent. It seems fitting that, in the midst of the post-Christmas hangover, when everyday life returns to the forefront, we ask ourselves how we survived this stress test. And, while we're at work, we worry about how to become the perfect family.

The hedgehog is a creature that naturally tends to curl up into itself and make its navel the sole object of its interest. It finds nothing external more appealing. For this reason, Saint Augustine saw in the hedgehog the sad image of narcissistic man, incapable of loving anything that doesn't reflect his own image. This man loves reflexively. incurvatus in se...curled up in self-indulgence. Such love, says Saint Augustine, betrays the true nature of love, which is altruistic. The essence of love is to love the image of the beloved in myself, not my own image in the beloved. Love is the self-transcendence of the lover in the beloved. To love is, in a certain way, to become the one who loves. It is necessary, therefore, to look at what we love, because that is what we are.

UNESCO has warned that the teaching profession is experiencing "an unprecedented crisis" and urges its revaluation. The ANPE teachers' union's ombudsman has repeatedly warned of the emotional decline of teachers, and in Catalonia, the USTEC union speaks of "the great resignation of teachers."

AND

At the beginning of the 20th century, aesthetic taste was no longer satisfied with mere quality and demanded novelty, especially in the form of transgression. By the end of the same century, a technological product, in addition to efficiently fulfilling its function, had to do so with originality. Excellence, in both art and technology, could only be innovative.

I imagine hell as a kind of hospital for the lonely, where only the word is heard. IAll the patients are condemned to repeat it spasmodically, but each time they do, the distance between them increases.

Gómez Pereira, Spanish doctor and humanist, developed in the pages of his Antoniana Margarita (1554) a paradoxical thesis. First, he assures us that animals are merely soulless automatons, made of flesh, blood, and bones, incapable of reasoning before acting, and who behave like a magnet and iron, following inevitable physical laws. But then he takes a turn and tells us that if animals could feel, "we would have to admit that men act in an inhuman, violent, and cruel manner. For what is more atrocious than beasts of burden carrying considerable weight on long journeys?" And what should we say about the spectacle of bullfighting, where the cattle seem to beg "for freedom with pleading lowing"? Only if animals cannot feel can we sleep morally sound.

When France was liberated from Nazism, Emmanuel Mounier, the father of Christian personalism, called four contributors to the magazine Esprit and their families to experience an intellectual adventure on a large estate with century-old trees located in Châtenay-Malabry, near Paris, christened The White Walls.

On August 20th, the OECD published what it called "Keys to Quality Education." I must warn that I'm not exactly overconfident about international educational institutions. The same Andreas Schleicher, director of the PISA tests, who in 2018 assured us that the name of Finland had become synonymous with excellence in education, in 2023 declared to Financial Times"We don't know if Finland has been part of the solution or part of the problem." I'd add that a few months ago I attended a press conference given by a Minister of Education from a Central American country who had been a senior official at UNESCO. She had no problem stating emphatically: "Content is no longer important. Why study, for example, the planets, if they change every year? What we should study is the influence of the planets on our lives!" A few days later, I met with her in her office. I asked her if I should congratulate her, since her country was considered by the OECD to be one of the most equitable in the world. "But our results are very low!" she replied. "Yes, they are very low, but they are uniform." And it was true. 75% of students in that country fall into the bottom two bands of the PISA results.

Pedagogist Daisy Christodoulou has drawn attention to something surprising. While everyone in the pedagogical world is talking about the skills of the future and the need to adapt our curricula to the new demands of the labor market, fitness is experiencing a golden age, although in the world of cognitive capitalism, jobs increasingly depend on brains and less on brawn. It seems obvious that anyone who goes to a sports center wants to face desirable challenges.coach to spare us from them would be useless.

Suddenly, we hear a loud noise from our car's engine. Since we're not very good at car mechanics, we fear it's a serious breakdown and immediately take it to the mechanic. He lifts the hood, listens to the noise carefully, and immediately perceives it as a precise symptom of a malfunction. He tightens a couple of screws and solves the problem. All in two minutes. But these two minutes are the synthesis of many years of learning, of overcoming increasing difficulties that have allowed him to fine-tune his hearing. Where the layman only hears noises, the expert hears a language. Those who are ignorant of mathematics, for example, are completely unaware that nature is always speaking to them, precisely because it speaks in the language of mathematics.

Karl Kraus was dying when he learned that the Japanese had invaded Manchuria. "None of that would have happened," he exclaimed, "if we had been more strict in the use of commas." I won't go as far as to say, but I do believe there's no way to develop critical thinking by ignoring the use of conjunctions. I completely agree with Antoni Capmany: "Anyone who can't read and write never speaks about what they're thinking."

Printed text has become a hieroglyph for many students. It requires a great deal of concentration for results that are not immediately apparent. They find it a daunting task to keep in mind the general plot while paying attention to the small details.

If we want to ride a dead horse, we are doomed to failure no matter how hard we try to change the saddle, create groups of experts to advise us on how to improve its efficiency, organize courses for riders on family constellations or mindfulness, etc. The only sensible thing to do is change horses, especially if ours was killed by our low expectations. But more likely, our discussions will focus on how to provide the dead horse with more innovative shoes.