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).

With a GDP exceeding €280 billion and more than eight million inhabitants, Catalonia would be positioned at the center of the European Union. Its human and economic dimensions invite better use of the capacities distributed throughout the country, which presents internal realities with a size and potential comparable to those of many European regions that promote their own innovation and smart specialization strategies (RIS3). It is necessary to bring out the endogenous and differentiated capacities of each Catalan region so that, with the involvement of their economic fabric and the support of at least one university, they can become knowledge regions responsible for their own development policies.

Rolf Tarrach Siegel (Valencia, 1948) is a professor of quantum physics. He has served as president of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), rector of the University of Luxembourg, and president of the European University Association.

I have decided to leave teaching after approximately 27 years of dedication to it. This decision stems from a deep reflection on my career as a student and teacher.

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.

In recent days, we've witnessed something that seemed like a sociological experiment. How would society react if, suddenly, what theoretically generated understandable concern—the irregularities and cases of corruption attributed to people linked to the PSOE—were replaced almost the same day by other, symmetrical issues—the irregularities and cases of corruption attributed to people linked to the PP? In a matter of hours, many citizens went from being very attentive to certain personal and partisan events to contemplating others that, in some way, cast doubt on the former (or vice versa). Certain improvised statements, later transformed into exercises in overinterpretation of reality by slicing them into pieces in talk shows, intersected with others that, conveniently reheated on social media, have now become part of the small local history of frivolity. Thank goodness these things never last more than twenty or thirty hours after the initial outbreak... All of this also has a global dimension. If Donald Trump were to announce today that he intends to get a divorce—this is the first example that comes to mind—it would generate a fleeting scrutiny on the subject, relegating the ignominious rubble of Gaza to the background. Let it be clear that I'm not referring to major natural disasters or other events that would justify a sudden change of subject, but to something inconsequential from a collective perspective.

In a new stretch, Donald Trump has proposed canceling university grants, including Harvard, the oldest university in the country, in an attempt to reverse the "ideology" he considers hostile to his surprising political ideals. woke.