John Stuart Mill assured in Utilitarianism that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied”. In his opinion, no minimally sensible human being would want to exchange the complexity of their life for the linear life of a happy imbecile. But are we sure? Plutarch answers us with a work dedicated to Grillus, a sailor of Ulysses who, after experiencing human and porcine life, considered the latter to be entirely preferable.When Ulysses arrived on the island of Aeaea, he visited the sorceress Circe accompanied by half of the crew. Circe invited them to a banquet, but she enchanted the food and turned the diners into pigs... Except for the reluctant Ulysses, who sensed some malice. Seeing his metamorphosed sailors, he begged Circe to return them to human form.—Are you sure —the sorceress asked him— that he will want to re-humanize himself who knows what it means to be an animal?The pig who had been the sailor Grillus resisted there with firmness. He had discovered that it was more comfortable to live off the gifts of generous nature than to rush into the labors of humans in harsh Ithaca. Animals, he said, live surrounded by what they need, while man, insatiable, does not stop working. Besides, animals use neither tricks nor deceptions when they fight. Nor do they need to remain continuously busy with superfluous desires. They are more frugal and moderate.—You should know, Ulysses —Grillus continued—, that all of us, far from considering ourselves inferior to you, despise you, because, evidently, what is said about your cunning is false. You reject outright the possibility of becoming a better being than you are. You behave like a child, but while you lie with Circe you tremble with fear, and you fear waking up turned into a pig, a wolf, or who knows what. And us, who have all our needs satisfied, you want to convince us to abandon what we have and embark with you, regaining the condition of sailors exposed to all dangers. Man is the most tiring and unfortunate of all creatures.—It seems to me, Grillus, that the metamorphosis you have undergone, besides ruining your figure, has disturbed your reason, because you have it full of absurd and wild opinions.—You’d better stop insulting and start dialoguing, if you want to understand why, after having experienced both kinds of life, we prefer the porcine.Fénelon dedicates to Grillus one of his Dialogues des morts, precisely titled, Ulysse et Grillus. What he tells us is that Grillus has plenty of arguments to remain a pig: "I find food everywhere, even in the least desirable places. Lawyers and wars, and all the other problems of life, mean nothing to me. I don't need a cook, nor a barber, nor a tailor, nor an architect. I am free and can satisfy my desires at a very low cost. Why should I recover the heap of human needs? A pig's homeland is where there are acorns. Don't talk to me anymore about reason, because if you look at the lives of men, you see nothing but madness. Isn't it better to be stupid than an evil fool? I much prefer to be a big, fat pig, satisfied with my filth, than a weak, vain, frivolous, cunning, deceitful, and unjust man, who expects to be, after his death, a sad shadow and a dissatisfied ghost with his condition".Also a notable philosopher, Pyrrho, found the porcine life so enviable that he put it forward as an example of a successful philosophical life. During a sea voyage he was taking with his disciples, a great storm broke out that frightened all the passengers, except for Pyrrho himself and a pig, which experienced it with a composure of spirit very rarely seen among men.—Thus, unperturbed, the wise man must remain in the face of dangers —said Pyrrho.Commenting on this anecdote, Montaigne asks: “Should we conclude that this advantage of reason, of which we are so proud and thanks to which we consider ourselves masters and emperors of the rest of creatures, has been granted to us to torment us?”We close this minimal porcine morality with Fosco Maraini. In the book Secret Tibet he assures that, since the rule of a community of monks only allowed eating the meat of marine animals, they decided to rename the pig as wild whale and they could eat sausages without scruples, which makes us think that, often, humans observe our farm animals as a living pantry. In fact, another philosopher, Chrysippus, maintains that the gods placed a soul in pigs to preserve their meat, as if it were salt, because the pig, he adds, is born to be sacrificed.

Ptolemy II was gifted a baby elephant that learned to speak Greek, an extraordinary phenomenon, because it was considered evident that the only language pachyderms understood was Hindi. The consul Lucian witnessed an elephant that had learned to write with its trunk “I myself have written this.”I don't know if Descartes was aware of it, but in a letter he wrote on November 1, 1644, he assured that monkeys could speak if they wanted to, but that they prefer to remain silent so that no one would make them work.There was a time – the fabulist Babrius testifies to this – without mistrust, in which all living creatures could speak and were familiar with the words we use to communicate. Even the pine trees, the laurels, or the reeds spoke. “Then, everything grew from the Earth, which asked for nothing in return, and camaraderie prevailed between gods and mortals.” It is a fact, Plutarch confirms, that at that time everyone spoke. And not only did they speak. Aristophanes the Grammarian assures that elephants fought with men for the love of maidens, that even a serpent fell passionately in love with a girl from Aetolia, and that dolphins and seals flirted with Mediterranean youths.Obviously, if everyone spoke, everyone could be indiscreet. When King Midas's barber discovered that the monarch had donkey ears, unable to keep silent, he dug a hole in the sand and shouted the secret into it. However, some reeds grew over the hole, and the wind, as it rocked them, spread the secret everywhere.I don't know when nature decided to stop talking to us, but the following fable suggests that in the Middle Ages, the ancient times were still remembered.Once upon a time, in the city of Edirne, there was a sultan who had no other friend than his camel. Only to him did he open his heart to make him confidant of his worries. Men interested him hardly at all. One night he dreamed he was talking to him and, upon waking, decided to give the richest province of the empire to whoever truly taught his camel to speak. It wasn't long before a long line of masters in the art of teaching camels to speak formed at the palace gates. After glancing at them, he declared he was willing to behead anyone who failed in the attempt. Immediately, they all vanished.—Oh! If you could tell me what you're thinking! —the sultan said to the camel.This wish reached Ali, a young pickpocket who was serving time for his misdeeds in a dungeon, who did not hesitate to present his candidacy as master of the camels.When the sultan saw him, dirty and half-naked, he distrusted him.—Do you know that if you cheat on me, you'll lose your head?—Oh, Almighty Lord! —exclaimed Ali as he prostrated himself—. For what reason would I risk my head, if I only have one? All my family, since the time of my great-great-great-grandfathers, have been dedicated to taming camels. And I can assure you, seeing yours, that in five years it will know how to speak clearly.—Five years?—Perhaps a human learns to speak before three? An animal takes a little longer.The sultan ordered Ali to be dressed in the finest robes. He granted him the richest of his provinces and ordered that after five years the camel be returned to him in condition to converse with him.Alí asked for permission to visit his parents before undertaking the task.At his home he was met with perplexity.—You know very well —his father told him— that in five, ten, or fifty years you will not manage to teach a camel a single word.—What a pity about your head! —his sister lamented.—Insensate! —the mother reproached him, covering him with kisses and tears.—You love me, and that's why you're worried, but calm down —Ali told them—. Many things can happen in five years. The sultan, or the camel, or I myself could die. Five years is 1,826 days that I will spend entirely outside of prison, living like a king. What poor person has the opportunity to live comfortably for so many days of their life?I wouldn't want to discourage anyone, but, if we follow literature, it seems easier to learn to understand the language of animals than to teach them to master ours. In Andanzas y prodigios de Ben-Sirá it is assured that human knowledge culminates in the interpretation of the languages of palm trees, angels, and foxes. Perhaps palm trees have their own Homer. The ancients could understand their stories, but we can no longer guarantee the veracity of the murmur that we can understand from their words.

The Dutch doctor Bernard Mandeville –translator into English of La Fontaine's fables– published in 1714 the surprising Fable of the Bees, which is, probably, the most original and famous political allegory about a beehive. It has been called the wickedest and most intelligent of all. In my opinion, it is philosophically essential reading precisely because it forces us to think against the current.It began as a long poem titled The buzzing hive or the redemption of the scoundrels, published anonymously in London in 1705. It was so remarkably successful that the author launched a second edition in a book titled The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Public Benefits (1714). In 1729, the seventh edition appeared, augmented. Its thesis is bold: the origin of morality and happiness are immorality and vice. Therefore, the universalization of honesty would be the ruin of a prosperous society.Mandeville's beehive is the prosperous England of the early 18th century, envied and feared by European nations for its efficient industriousness. But on closer observation, Mandeville saw that individuals do not work motivated by the common good, but by selfishness. The common good is the result of the involuntary conjunction of individual selfish greed, vanity, luxury, envy, vice, and hypocrisy. In other words, collective prosperity is the sum of partial interests completely ignorant of the common good.The British swarm certainly lives in a cozy and spacious hive, in tranquility and abundance. Their laws and armies, their science and industry, are universally admired, and rightly so. "Never did bees know a wiser government." Their kings can do no wrong because "their power is wisely limited by laws." All that is best found in any other society is found among these bees in an excellent manner.Mandeville brings the critical focus closer to factual reality and discovers that the nation is split into two halves. The first earns a living by the sweat of their brow and their work seeks to produce everything that can satisfy the other half. But the voracity of this second half, which lives at the expense of the sweat of the naive, is insatiable. It is made up ofarrivistes, parasites, gamblers, swindlers, counterfeiters, tricksters, fortune-tellers... and sophisticated scoundrels, like the jurisconsults, who, "only intent on collecting substantial fees, do everything possible to prevent litigation from being settled by agreement." The doctors are not far behind, more attentive to their profit than to the health of their patients. There are even priests who preach restraint and moderation but are incontinent and avaricious.Inequalities can be cruel: there are war mutiles who are paid a pittance, while some cowards who never entered battle receive double pay.There is no social class that does not have a stain, but the whole enjoys "a happy prosperity" because, whatever the pretensions of the gluttons may be, it turns out that their vices contribute to public happiness, so that "even the most shameless" contribute to the common good, which is nothing other than the involuntary harmony of opposites. The temperance of some favors the excess of others; the generosity of those, the avarice of others; the luxury of the rich gives work to the poor; the self-love of each stimulates the growth of arts and commerce. In this apparently paradoxical way the hive has access to the comforts and sweetness of life.Unexpectedly, one day a tempest of puritanism arose and the bees insisted on replacing everything bad with good things. Hypocrisy, corruption, and deceit were persecuted, and they achieved such a clear social transparency that no one could hide their flaws. This was the cause of their downfall. When they managed to universalize honesty, the cheaters were left jobless; with the triumph of sobriety, those who lived by producing luxury were ruined. With the disappearance of the superfluous, the uselessness of doctors, lawyers, and judges was revealed. "No one sought novelty, no one aspired to anything. No one spent. The militia was abandoned and the hive was left defenseless".Mandeville concludes: “Vice is as necessary in a flourishing state as hunger is necessary to compel us to eat. It is impossible for virtue alone to make a nation famous and glorious”. The idea that morality can be caused by immorality fascinated Nietzsche.

A significant part of the left is arguing that AI has displaced the class struggle into the digital realm. I am surprised by this stance, because the left has been characterized by a very marked technological mentality. How many times have we heard that philosophers have only interpreted the world, when what is needed is to change it? The assumption that supports this thesis of Marx is that the world is an artifact that can be reconstructed in harmony with our ideals. In this conviction lies the essence of technology.Today we consider change a priority, not because it is in our hands to modify the direction of history, but because it has become independent of our will. Those who do not adapt to the new, futurists tell us, are condemned to disappear.When Marx wanted to change the world, he behaved like a representative of truth. Today, truth is change. That is why there is no way to coherently criticize AI from the left without radically changing the image of the world as a manipulable object; that is, without recovering a relationship with the world that is not exclusively utilitarian and that allows us to stop and listen to our own fears. This simple gesture of stopping to listen to the surrounding world is, in itself, an affirmation of freedom that allows us to anchor our urgencies in the riverbed of Heraclitus' river. We do not know if we are boarding the Titanic, but we have assumed that the only thing we cannot do is not board, because there is no longer solid ground. We do not know, either, if the icebergs are illusions of our own fear. We are no longer able to differentiate what is real from what is possible.

In one of his plays, Camus explains that Saint Demetrius had an appointment with God himself in the steppe one day. On his way, he found a peasant whose cart had got stuck up to the axle in thick mud. He didn't think twice. He rolled up his sleeves and helped him. He had to work hard, but in the end, they managed to free the cart and Saint Demetrius ran to his appointment. But God was no longer there.I have thought a lot about this "he was no longer there". My theologian friends tell me that God was the farmer, but they don't convince me. My experience tells me that I am always late for appointments with God, even if for much less philanthropic reasons than those of Saint Demetrius. But I am not so late that I cannot see some trace of his evanescent presence. Thinking about it, when the mayor of Masnou invited me to give an intervention in public space, I responded by writing on a pedestrian crossing in the town that "The soul is the cage where the dandelion of the bird that has just escaped floats".The place where I most clearly feel the echo of the expanding wave of his presence is in the face of good Christians, of whom there are some, even if they don't care much for marketing. I can assure you: interacting closely with them is one of life's great experiences. It is possible to doubt God's existence. It is within anyone's reach. The Bible is full of doubters and the wary. But in the face of a good Christian, it is difficult not to believe that the light that illuminates their face is vicarious of another, greater light. It has been good Christians who have made me, a very mediocre Christian, understand the meaning of Nietzsche's words in Beyond Good and Evil: “To the homines religiosi one could include among artists as their supreme category.”I met Viqui Molins many years ago, at a bookstore stand on Sant Jordi's Day. I was struck by the number of neglected people, with evident existential wounds, who came to greet her. She knew their names and surnames, the history of their despair. She was interested in their problems with a welcoming and sincere normality. I asked her what exactly she did. "I am a Teresian nun," she told me. I already knew that, but there was something deeper in her than a mere charisma of label. She explained to me that she took care of the bad thief. "It's easy – she clarified – to take care of the good thief. He has stumbled, you help him up and from that moment on he walks straight and grateful; the bad thief, however, takes advantage of you helping him to vomit to steal your wallet." And at that moment I saw the light of her face.

In August 2008, chance brought me to the scorching city of Page, Arizona. I have never experienced more scorching heat in my life. To try and keep myself biologically intact, I took refuge with a pitcher of beer at the Mexican restaurant La Fiesta. I was glancing at the Lake Powell Chronicle when Stevie Manniel, a Navajo Indian, sat next to me. He was half-drunk and wanted money. I showed him the state of my pants, in tatters, and he replied that only the rich dared to go out on the street with ripped pants.—What do you find interesting in the newspaper? —he/she asked me.I told him about a piece of news that I found surprising: the county's educational authorities were organizing teenage work teams during the hottest months of summer. They did strenuous work, such as repairing street furniture or the gardens of the elderly, or even road labor, with the aim of creating bonds between isolated teenagers, because —the newspaper said— "there is no worse company for teenagers than loneliness." Although everything was organized by the county's educational authorities, the implementation was carried out by local police volunteers without any financial compensation. One policeman assured that working under those climatic conditions made the collaboration between all those involved and the creation of bonds of trust and solidarity essential. Participation was voluntary and young people could withdraw whenever they wished.Given that my image of deep America's police was shaped by the arbitrary sheriffs of Hollywood movies, all of this surprised me so much that I took it with suspicion, even though the program supervisor assured that the mission of the police is, first and foremost, to prevent crime and ensure the well-being of the entire community. And then, surprisingly, that woman quoted Plato: the mission of the police, she said, is to guarantee the freedom of citizens.

"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.