To Miss Greta
Short videos abound on social networks, revealing our students’ ignorance of topics considered basic. The format is almost always the same: an interviewer, camera in hand, approaches young people – outside school or on the street – and offers them money in exchange for answering some questions, the kind we call “trivia” or “general knowledge.” As viewers, we are surprised to see the interviewees miss out on the prize because they do not know what continent Mexico is on, or because they believe that a synopsis is “when you are hypnotized”… and things like that.
The answers provoke amazement and, of course, laughter, and, surely, allow the teachers hearing them to let off some steam they carry from the tension of having to face, daily, classes of students like these: young people without the slightest interest in knowledge, kids who stay continuously distracted with their cell phones and who, when they look up from the screen, that is, when they deign to look around them, burst into disruptive behaviors and do not stop talking, moving, or shouting.
The problem obviously has its counterpart in what students think of teachers and study programs. I do not have statistical data, but none is needed to intuit that most students find the class content irrelevant to their lives and, to make matters worse, teachers do not know how to explain it or make it minimally engaging; this, together with the obligation to remain confined to the classroom, amply justifies their total lack of interest and self-control.
In reality, these conflicts date back a long time but now seem to be in crisis as never before. Teachers and students expect less and less from each other, and their alliance – which, as we know, is always put to the test – threatens to break down. With this, the school community sees its weakest link, and undoubtedly also its most valuable one – the teacher-student relationship – crack, putting the entire educational apparatus at risk.
If we were to stop and review the causes of this crisis, we could write an entire transdisciplinary encyclopedia covering topics such as philosophy, history, pedagogy, psychology, sociology, and economics. Among many other things, we would see that the arrival of these young people into adolescence coincided with a global tragedy – the COVID pandemic – that put at risk not only the pillars of their immediate community but also the pillars of their own lives. To describe what they might be going through, it would be too little to talk about their anguish, fear, and the desire to escape, or to diagnose their delayed maturity, a propensity for alienation, and many other things. As for what teachers are currently experiencing, we would also have to consider the impact of COVID, as well as the lack of working conditions that enable them to deal with these disruptive and apathetic young people: low salaries, heavy academic demands, flimsy evaluation criteria, obsolete programs and study models, among others.
A Machiavellian perspective – not necessarily wrong – would consider the possibility that, to make matters worse, this crisis between students and teachers is being encouraged and exploited by academic institutions themselves as part of a strategy to gradually get rid of teachers and replace them with AI-generated models. Such a strategy would avoid restricting the use of cell phones in the classroom and, instead, blame teachers for their lack of expertise. It sounds paranoid, but perhaps it is not.
In any case, the crisis is as real as it is complex and profound; it penetrates so deeply that it invites us to set aside piecemeal solutions (content restructuring, disciplinary resources, pedagogical strategies, etc.) and refer, instead, to the very essence of what we call school, that is, to what five years ago, during the COVID pandemic, I called the school ritual in several writings, which addressed the very foundations of our educational communities, that is, to what gives meaning to their continued existence.
“It is the ritual character,” I said in one of those texts, “that has allowed the school institution to endure under the storm. Above and beyond the specific strategies of each institution, what prevails is the memory of those legendary scenes in which one of the wise men of the tribe gathers children and young people around a bonfire to tell them the story of past generations, infecting them with the narration of the vicissitudes and feats that have allowed their community to survive the centuries. Our ritual is like that: it is based on simple and profound things: attending classes, sitting close to other classmates, warming oneself with the flame of a common goal, and staying alert and ‘present’ to listen to and question the teacher.” In subsequent texts in the same series, among these “simple and profound things” I added several components of the same ritual: play, the call to truth, and the exploration of different social roles, for example. However, I forgot a very important one. Perhaps it was the solemnity imposed by the pandemic that prevented me from noticing what I now see at the very origin of all the others. I am talking about laughing together.
With this, we delve into the realm of the essential, and at times the only way to talk about it is through poetics; much of what I am going to say will seem utopian. But the proposal is real and practical. That is, I invite applying it both in the classroom and in all areas of the school context. It is, without a doubt, a joyous proposal that, precisely for this reason, will deserve the rejection of those who, like the monk in The Name of the Rose, would burn Aristotle’s Comedy to save the world from dissipation, and this because laughter kills fear and, with it, undermines order and authority. The invitation, then, is to all members of the educational community, starting with the administrators and officials who govern it and truly want to safeguard it.
My proposal did not originate in the classroom but in a theater, during a children’s play. It is a memory of mine: that of a little girl whom—in the darkness of the theater—I only knew through her laughter. I would have been thirty or thirty-five years old; she, at most, five or six. I never saw her; I didn’t know what she looked like physically, nor did I hear her speak, but I knew her, and met her in a way that remains within me, solely through our laughter. In the middle, as I say, of the darkness of the theater, alone in our intimacy, the lead puppet protagonist said something amusing, and she and I laughed, clearly louder than the rest of the audience. I heard my own laughter in hers: it arose at the same time, with the same intensity and cadence. It was an intelligent, happy laugh, full of wit, even of acerbity. Through it, I communicated with that little girl, and by some kind of magic, she is now always here with me. I have the certainty (not entirely irrational) that she and I, two strangers, still accompany each other.
The scientific basis for that experience of radical connection lies in a research study I consulted years ago, which showed that when two people laugh at the same thing – as happened between that girl and me – their electroencephalograms are also identical, manifesting a perfect momentary harmony. Laughter, I have no doubt, is a sudden and powerful form of encounter.
Laughter is social. Laughing is much more enjoyable when a crowd laughs with us. Laughter unites us; its abrupt jolt snaps us to the present moment: hence it is radically important for the life of every true community, for only the present is common to all. If it has been said that laughter is a gift from the gods, it is because of the ease and delight which allow us to share existence.
Laughter is one of the foundations of our ability to create solid communities. Homo ridens, we could call ourselves (or, if we want something funnier, Homo ridiculus, which is more or less the same).
The French philosopher Henri Bergson describes laughter as a social reaction to someone or something failing to notice a change. A man is running and, not noticing a pothole in the road, trips. A woman in a hurry can’t find a way out of a revolving door. A homeless man steps on a banana peel on the floor, and…
Edward de Bono, known as the discoverer of lateral thinking, takes up Bergson’s idea, but points out that we also laugh when something that follows a certain logic surprises us with a sudden break, an abrupt leap into a different logic, revealing something very different from what we expected, something that perhaps we did not dare to see.
For example, in a courtroom:
“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
“No.
A single word has thrown our entire judicial system overboard. The response reflects not only the cynicism of one individual, but that of society, delighted to mock its blind inertia and its own falseness.
In a panorama like the present, with so much darkness, understood not only as evil but as isolation and separation, as the invisibility of one another, laughter can be a ray that crosses the room and suddenly illuminates others, revealing its presence.
In doing so, it also brings everything hidden to light. Groucho Marx, the brilliant comedian, used to defend his moral or political ideas in interviews, always ending by telling his interlocutor:
“Anyway, such are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”
Laughter runs through the community, illuminating the darkness we share. It exposes hidden agreements, hypocrisies, and deceit; betrays false differences and repressions; and accuses those who conspire against the community, as well as those who distance themselves because they feel inferior or believe themselves superior. Its value lies in the fact that we laugh together and thus make evident our small and great difficulties, those that constitute us as a species.
Laughter is the electroencephalogram of a vital community.
In the end, what it is about is recognizing the great universal pothole that keeps us awake, alive, the omnipresent banana peel on which we have all stumbled or may stumble one day: a liberating recognition that presents us with a new opportunity to reconnect, to bridge the gap that kept us distant from each other. As a communal expression, laughter can extend lines of communication within a society that believed itself unknown, suddenly revealing all the ties that, in reality, unite it.
That is why, given the way things are in our educational communities, I would dedicate an entire school year just to laughing: to laughing with students and administrators, to laughing at them and letting them laugh at us; to eliminate, in this way, all artificial differences to restore the trust and unity that, deep down, we long for. I would put aside all academic programs, assessment, all obligations, and all hierarchy, at least those we could not make fun of and laugh at together.
Let us devote our class and our teaching energy to restoring the fabric of the school community through laughter: to discover again and again that instant when our brains synchronize, to admit that human beings – however we are seen – are, at best, as delightfully assertive and ridiculous as that man who, in the middle of a courtroom, admitted that he, like everyone else, was not willing to tell the truth.
“The time we spend laughing is time we spend with the gods,” a Japanese proverb allegedly says. I believe the gods swiftly descend when they hear us laugh, eager for our company. My proposal, I now realize, is none other than to leave the doors of our schools always open for the gods to enter.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
