"E pluribus unum" (Unity in plurality) is the motto on the coat of arms of the United States, the title of a landmark 2007 academic article, and the ideal of any society that makes pluralism a supreme constitutional value, which is to promote the freedom of citizens without fostering their division into factions.The article was signed by the social democratic sociologist Robert Putnam, who was an advisor to Clinton, Tony Blair and Obama, and begins as follows: "One of the most important challenges facing modern societies, and at the same time one of our most significant opportunities, is the increase in ethnic and social heterogeneity in practically all advanced countries".There is –Putnam assures us– a limit to plurality beyond which it becomes difficult to maintain the ideal of a community made up of heterogeneous members. If it is crossed, plurality degrades into the atomization of isolated individuals who have no intermediaries between their self and the community space.The growth of social heterogeneity is favored both by migratory dynamics and by underlying currents in modern societies that tend to see value in difference. In fact, today we understand equality as the equal right to be different (hence dominant emotivism). In schools it is said that each student learns differently (when our similarities are greater than our differences) and at universities there is an insistence on the incommensurability of different cultures. We are privatizing morality, but since we are unable to provide ourselves with a coherent moral order, we have burdened ourselves with such excessive responsibilities that we end up evading them. However, if we erode shared moral standards, we deprive ourselves of the possibility of peacefully resolving the inevitable disputes of communal life.It would be culturally suicidal to ignore the challenges of heterogeneity. The phenomenon of native flight” is well known, for example, which tells us that when the concentration of immigrant students in educational centers reaches certain thresholds, native families take their children to centers with a more homogeneous student body. Something similar happens in neighborhoods, leisure spaces, and public services.

It was evident that the pressure cooker would explode. And it has done so with a bang, as expected. Now the doubt is whether, as things stand, teachers will return to classrooms with more or less frustration than they felt when they started the protests.The Department of Education has not lived up to the situation and it seems that the opportunity for a quid pro quo has been lost. At first, and in declarations surprising for their naivety, the minister Esther Niubó (she knows that I personally appreciate her) declared that she shared the teachers' demands and that she extended her hand to the unions to negotiate. In a message on X, she remarked that the strike was a "call for recognition of a profession that requires all the support of the Government".Even so, it was decided to reach an agreement with two minority education unions, CCOO and UGT, leaving out the two majority ones, USTEC and ASPEPC-SPS. Now the minister finds herself in a deadlock, because if she reforms the agreement reached with the former, she will put them in a bad light, and if she does not reform it, the soufflé of teacher discontent will not go down.Many families are wondering what teachers want now. Well, they want, to begin with, the same as them: a salary increase and an improvement in their working conditions.The school cannot survive without optimism or self-confidence, and a basic law of human affairs tells us that the images we project (rightly or wrongly) of ourselves are true in their consequences. Some years ago, a Singaporean politician, to whom I asked what the keys to his country's educational success were, immediately replied: "That all those involved know why they do what they do and that they are convinced that what they do is the best they can do."If we listen to our teachers, we soon realize that we are not Singapore. This does not mean that there are no teachers and educational centers of great quality. It means something more important: that the key to Catalonia's educational progress is not in their hands. Who has it is the perplexity of teacher 60,001 (accepting that there are 120,000 teachers in Catalonia in round numbers).

“In teaching, it has become fashionable to adopt new and fanciful ideas, and many young teachers are carried away by the mistaken notion that unless a method is new, it cannot be the best. However, it is well to remember that change does not necessarily imply progress. Every method must be subjected, first, to the laws of common sense applied to the development of the child’s mind, and, second, to the test of actual classroom experience, before it can be considered the best method, or even a good method”. This paragraph is extracted from page 105 of a book published in New York in 1885 and titled The Eclectic Manual of Methods for the Assistance of Teachers. Any sensible person knows that the new and the good are different categories and that they can coincide or diverge. But in education, as the American pedagogue Robert Pondiscio recently said, “stability is easily confused with complacency or indifference. Therefore, schools reward the appearance of change over real improvement.” These words may seem exaggerated, but if I review my teaching experience since the early 70s, what I see is a kind of St. Vitus' dance of novelties that present themselves with a lot of promises under their arm, but which expire in four or five years. The usual thing is that the change has not been approved for being the technical answer to a problem, but because it allows us to show ourselves full of comforting vitality.And what if to improve Catalan schools the first thing we need is to cure our addiction to miracle solutions?According to Pondiscio, the reasons that explain the vulnerability of schools to phosphorescent ideas are four: The first is the weakness of our evaluation and feedback systems, which hinders an objective view of our results. There are so many variables at play in an educational center that it is very difficult to identify the specific responsibility of each one in the running of the center. The cause-and-effect relationship is never entirely clear, and where we discover correlations that align with our ideology, we tend to see causation.

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.