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The preamble to the confession
A few days ago, while writing this article, I remembered a personal anecdote that seemed convenient to open this text. Initially, I intended to give a little color to the writing, but the story grew little by little, acquiring a confessional tone that filled several pages. What the reader has in his hands is, therefore, a confession. The confessional genre has been present in literature for centuries, and that is partly what encouraged me to rescue it here and offer it to the public. Above all, the feeling moves me that its words say something important about the place that schools occupy in training certain people with specific difficulties. In this introspective account, that something is barely insinuated, but I think it’s still worth sharing in the hope that the reader will rescue it and delineate it more clearly.
Sketched clumsily, the approach is more or less this: much has been discussed about the urgency to excel as a substantial part of human nature, but very little consideration at the same time describes the existence in each of us of the opposite urgency of not excelling, as forceful and encompassing as the former, leading us to create real or psychological burrows where we crouch. In general, thanks to education at home and school, human beings cope with this double inner force until they find a balance. Yet, this balance does not prevent one of the forces from predominating a little in each person, determining some character traits: there are the leaders, as valuable as those who know how to be led.
However, some individuals have had to suffer without being able to mitigate these opposing impulses. Experiencing more difficulty in achieving balance, these people may find themselves in trouble if the environment fortuitously favors any of them. Such would be the case of deeply withdrawn people who are simultaneously deeply anxious to make a mark, suddenly summoned by some social context to emerge, turning them into small or great tyrants, or individuals in the opposite situation, that is, deprived again and again of opportunities to express themselves, and forced to plunge into the opposite arbitrariness, one of a resentful self-absorption.
I conclude this duality is detectable beginning in youth, and teachers have the opportunity to do a lot for these young people at that stage of life. If we were to ask for a profile of these youths, we would see that these are young people who live immersed in themselves and strive to show again and again their extreme difficulty in taking the floor. At certain times, one or two of them end up not only taking it but wresting it from others, even dictating it to others. Do I need to include that they can succeed as dictators with the right eloquence and audience?
“I have lost” or “I am lost?” The Confession
I still remember what my psychoanalyst told me when I told him about the profound differences years ago that had distanced me from my high school classmates: differences in my way of thinking, my intellectual and artistic concerns, my social and political ideology, my religious thoughts (I was an atheist), and even in my way of dressing. “They sent you to war without a gun,” he told me, referring to the household decision for me to go to that school.
Particularly, my difficulty in making friends with whom I fully identified was notable. Sometimes I preferred to stay in the classroom reading instead of going out to share a recess that was not really “recreational” for me but a lot of stress. I did end up making good friends, but it was because I knew how to compensate for those differences with a sense of humor and continuous histrionics, ridiculing all my differences by mocking myself and others. Many of my classmates celebrated me, but some were offended by jokes that seemed harmless to me, but now that I am an adult, I realize that they deserve the title of bullying. For my part, these stratagems kept me safe and isolated, but at the same time, I could be quite the accepted guy when I wanted to get closer.
Simultaneously, I attended a theater academy that offered evening workshops for teenagers. There, my histrionic gifts and charisma (let’s call it that) gave me an excellent standing among my peers, who accepted and loved me and even came to admire me. Most followed me when I proposed to form a theater group outside the institution. However, once I assumed leadership, things began to go wrong. Convinced of my artistic ideals, I wanted to impose them on the group, along with a discipline entirely out of place for those young people who wanted to create more relaxed theater. One by one, they all defected.
The opposite happened a few years later when, in reaction to the earthquake of ’85, I formed a group with people a little younger than me, who soon faithfully followed everything I said as I became their leader. The tragic context of those days favored the grateful acceptance of my discipline, and soon we achieved what was, for us, an extraordinary theatrical production. At the end of it, after the days of the earthquake, everyone turned to follow me in obedience to the next step. Then I was the one who gave up the project.
I thus entered the typical vicious cycle of the self-defeating competitor. When I reached my university years, I went to school; I shined in academic expositions in front of the whole class and received applause… And frightened by that breakthrough, I provoked long discussions with my teachers and companions and ended up withdrawn into myself, saddened and defeated. I switched to another major, where, again, I was considered an outstanding student…and soon backed down. I returned to my previous major, charmed my new classmates there, and when I was appointed student representative, I disappeared without a trace.
This back-and-forth became increasingly extreme and strenuous. I never believed much in horoscopes, but I was surprised by the description that someone once made of my zodiac sign, Libra: the rise and fall of the scales in search of balance are never smooth, but on the contrary, the scales can have huge polarity, beating both sides with more and more force.
So I went into therapy. Something in me felt the intermediate opportunity that emerges when running away from two extremes. Looking back years, I understood that I had repeatedly gone to war without a rifle, but skillfully built a stick rifle, assuming the role of a buffoon and conquering as such, but then renouncing the much higher King’s Jester, for which many felt I was gifted.
Somehow, I must admit, I am a survivor of that malady of those able to compete but unable to abide by the triumph.
***
There was, I now realize, a third territory between capacity and self-defeat that was present in that theater academy for teenagers I attended almost every afternoon for a couple of years. Theater is a team effort, but in that place, we were closer, almost like a family. (Throughout history, by the way, many of the great theater companies have been family businesses). In our academy, the father figure was a “teacher” who had figured like few in the theatrical scene of our country and who, at that time, suffered some marginalization by political rivals. This man placed dramatic art almost on a pedestal like a mother and taught us to love her. I, who had always surrendered at the foot of any stage, could ascend one in a precious balance for the first time. This balance involved a great discipline, which none of those young people wanted to transgress because attending classes was the greatest enjoyment we could give ourselves.
We knew the value of art by staging pieces with which we fully identified. We knew what a full house was, and to top it off, in our last season, the teacher arranged for an entrance fee, and the profit was distributed to the actors. Thus, we recovered precisely the amount our families had paid for the course registration.
The teacher seemed to contemplate everything that would teach us to honor art as a balancing act. However, strangely, his pedagogy included preventing us from professionally engaging in theatre. He said that teenagers could find art a great tool to acquire maturity but that in no way should they dedicate their lives to it. That man loved the theater and strangely wished it would succumb.
Any resemblance to my process?
Today (since I am answering the question about what education I want), I dream that the teacher would have persevered many more years in his leadership, walking beside us with the balance that some of us needed so much. I dream that I would create a school where we could professionalize and develop a life of artistic, ethical, and practical values. It would not have been the only art institution that offered its students parallel training to secondary and high school, nor the first theatrical project that gave its members a stable way of life, even economically. I dream of a reality different from what it was. The teacher gave up on us. Deprived of that world, several of us sought to professionalize ourselves in schools from which we later dropped out. Today, some of my colleagues maintain artistic careers, and there is no lack of some reaching the summit. But I can’t help but think that a great opportunity was lost for young people like me, who, with the right leadership, could have avoided that territory of peaks and abysses that awaited us.
So, in conclusion, I dream of pure utopias. And that’s not bad. We all know the value that utopias recover in times like ours. So discredited in the past decades of Success and Excellence, they are today our basis for imagining and reanimating ourselves (reinventing ourselves, some say). Thus, I reiterate here that I dream of schools that do not treat students in a standardized way but embrace the broad spectrum of the human personality, with all its ups and downs (“Each person is a center,” says the pedagogue Francoise Doltó). But there is more: I dream of schools that are committed to its people and their fulfillment, determinedly creating links with society, not only to supply it with the professionals it demands but to impose inclusive initiatives that can compete, through their strength and creativity, against social structures that sacrifice those who cannot adapt.
Alarmist epilogue
I conclude by warning that in times like ours of artificial intelligence and pandemic horror, educational institutions have a unique opportunity to grasp the wheel to give a forceful boost to human originality and individual personalities. We are already seeing how standardized training is beginning to be unable to compete against artificial intelligence tools that apply the middle ground much more efficiently. If we continue to privilege the development of impersonal and inauthentic professionals, society will soon be left without one or the other (standard or original people). At that point, schools will no longer offer anyone anything.
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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