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The fact that our planet already has too many human beings goes from mere theory to palpable reality when we stop having the necessary skills to face this fact. This has begun to happen to me lately, or rather, something I have become aware of. It started in a situation that would seem simple. I have to drive only a few streets to take my youngest son to school every morning, which seems somewhat conflicting. To tell the truth, my problem does not start in the streets but before, in my bed, where I almost always wake up tired, and also later, when I have to hurry my son to get ready for school. Daybreak is not easy. I awake to a logistical and emotional problem (my son is neither organized nor obedient), and I am already an alert animal when I leave home.
As I say, the school is close, but at the first corner, the road separates into five super busy streets; from there, the multitude of cars, we enter a narrow road full of potholes. Turning onto the little street that goes to school also implies care because of its narrowness. The last challenge is traveling the three hundred meters separating me from the entrance hall where I leave my son. In that final stretch of road, the parents have had to learn to be considerate of each other (those approaching the school with those coming from it) because the road is not only narrow, but the neighbors leave their cars and pickups parked on the street, and sometimes even their trucks. In these dazed hours, I cannot help but think that they do it on purpose, resentful of the traffic caused by the parents going to the schools around them.
Convincing myself that this is not the case is not easy. The garbage truck passes, and people drive, pulling their boats; one must be attentive to the other cars because the passage has been reduced to a single lane. Almost all the parents circulating know that those of us rushing to leave our children are more in a hurry than those who have dropped them off, and we give way to each other to suit this circulation. Many of us thank each other with a gesture, glimpsing behind the car windows the faces of strangers who wave their hands and sometimes smile. And so, it is the same with the return, after each leaves their child, having said goodbye and giving the last instructions for school. But fine, my return home is more rested, although not enough to make me forget my next obligations, which will begin soon.
On one of those days, I realized (and I began to feel it in my bones) that there are already too many human beings on the planet. To understand this better, you must consider that not everything is reduced to preparing to leave home in the morning and the traffic on the road. Leaving aside my dreams of that night, which could have been sad or frightening; leaving aside the quarrel I had with my brother as well as the memory of old breakups with friends, which at times still overwhelms me; leaving aside even (at least in theory) the economic narrowness of those days; leaving all that aside, something is clear: I am a modern man, and I live subjected to the over-information that, in the end, is nothing but a manifestation of the enormous number of human beings inhabiting the world and influence me daily in some way. I cannot deny that I am overwhelmed by the phantoms of so many people with whom my life is intertwined, to begin with, because I am part of a society in crisis (worse, at war in some strategic regions of the planet), and because I carry all that in my head even though, for a long time, I have refused to listen to the news every day, and I have stopped entering and entering and entering and entering Facebook.
Here opens a second part of this text to wonder if it would not be better for me to watch the news and also be aware of what is happening in the world (including the emotional world of social networks) precisely because of what I say at the beginning of this article, namely, that the true weight of reality becomes palpable at the moment when our skills to cope with it fail. Wouldn’t being aware of what’s happening in newspapers and social media be crucial to know the monster I confront? Would it be sufficient to perceive it even slightly in the daily hustle and bustle and feel “managed” almost all the time?
Perhaps the reader has more skills than I do to take on these challenges. Or maybe not, and it does him some good to know that there are others like him in this world, full of old and new burdens for which they are unprepared. Peter Jarvis, the English pedagogue, took on the task for many years of reminding us that contemporary humans are subjected to tremendous pressures that force us to learn – and learn all the time. We live second by second, acquiring new skills to handle challenges (apparently, even those as simple as turning on a hyper-busy neighborhood street).
Now I understand (yes, suddenly it becomes crystal clear to me!) why, in the new pedagogical treatises, the old words we used to refer to school objectives (education, training, coexistence) have been transformed into much more technical terms, which, despite their functionalist tone, seem wrapped in an archaic sound: Talking about developing skills, abilities, and competencies has always sounded to me like magic tricks to survive in an inhospitable environment. I talk about this and imagine the first homo sapiens learning to flee, terrified of deadly creatures creeping slowly through the undergrowth or wielding burning sticks against a wild beast to distract it and then attack it together. The truth is that I don’t know much about our ancestors. Still, I imagine they were just that, beings developing skills and abilities to survive in a world overpopulated with threatening creatures, acquiring skills to choose between food and poisons (after having witnessed how some plants made a friend writhe in pain, vomit, become pale, and stop moving); skills to know when to lie down, sleep, wake up… survival skills.
In today’s world, there is no longer time for the education we once wanted, that is, one in which values and forms of behavior are transmitted at a pace according to each person. Now we have to want other things, more appropriate in a world that requires us to learn at full speed, all the time, most of the time by ourselves, and without being able to wait for parents and teachers to transmit truths to us in a leisurely way so that we understand them.
Now, humans must always be alert (for example, it is barely ten in the morning, and I am already talking about all this!).
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The third and final part of this text takes up the central idea of this series of articles on The Education We Want, where I can freely express my desires about education, whether they are achievable or not. Finally, I am on utopian ground and allowed everything (of course, as long as it arises from an authentic desire, from a true wanting).
So, I ask myself: What do I want education to be like in this overpopulated world I face daily? An essential tool to guide the response is the so-called actor-observer asymmetry, a concept used in psychology and ethics. Its role is central to understanding human difficulties (physical and metaphysical) and why they are exacerbated in certain circumstances, for example, when there are too many humans on the planet. This concept’s urgency should be prioritized in our research; instead, we see it relegated to the bottom drawer, where the least important and oldest issues abound and are never resolved.
Before getting into this, I invite those who do not see themselves reflected in this concept to cast the first stone. The current version goes more or less like this: human beings judge themselves, always considering contextual factors (“I did it because…”). However, judging other people, we do not value those factors and condemn their actions by attributing them to internal conditions, such as mal-intention, selfishness, ignorance, “stupidity,” and similar generalizations. In other words, we blame others for things we excuse ourselves. In my example (that of taking my son to school), this attitude is expressed when I honk my horn for the driver ahead of me to move forward, and I shout profanity at the one who honks at me. Taken to the extreme, the actor-observer asymmetry convinces the tyrant that we will do better if we all listen to him. In an overpopulated world, honking becomes the everyday language, and tyranny is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
An education that helps us correct this asymmetry would be highly desirable. It is a learning that begins by limiting myself and expanding the place I give another. It is either one of two: there is not always a justification for my actions, and there is for the acts of others; I am not the center of the world, and another is (“Each person is a center,” says educator Francoise Doltó, who also thinks that communication is the human mission in this world).
Thus, for me, it is clear that in the face of the saturation of the vital space, the solution is not the old equation, “Quítate tú pa’ ponerme yo” (“Get out of the way for me”), but another infinitely more appropriate and also tricky one. The school I want would use the Basic Equation of Human Coexistence, which is very simple: “When there is a lack of space outside, you open space inside.” The teachers can explain it like this: “For us all to fit in the world, we must give others a place inside us.” And they can conclude: “It is called love of neighbor, but it is a concept that takes a long time to understand, and its practice requires daily training. We’ll leave it for the next class!”
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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