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Ludwig Wittgenstein, regarded by many as the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, wrote: “All mythology is contained in our language.” According to him, in our mother tongue, we unsuspectingly receive an entire culture. Just as genes inherit our biological burden, language (whose structure is perhaps more complex than those of genes) conveys to us a whole way of seeing the world.
In previous articles, I have spoken about some school community characteristics that expand among all its members in that unsuspecting way, without their awareness, about what language does. It creates what the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls “a community without communication,” that is, a human group united without the need for some message to be conveyed among its members. (The concept is strange, but Han mentions it to contrast it with today’s society, which through social media sends out what he describes as “a communication without community.”)
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that school, once a place of learning, is a community that, by the very fact of existing, brings contention and also gives weight to life, and meaning, even more in conditions of catastrophe. That is why I have called educational ritual something that since time immemorial characterizes the school, a ritual that is completed today outside the school, that is, in remote, dispersed, and virtual classrooms. (See “The educational ritual in times of pandemic.”)
There are several components of this ancestral ritual. One is the understanding that all learning contains rest and fun. The word “school“ comes from the Greek “schola,” which means “leisure.” (See “The school ritual: learning as a game.”) Another is the immediate acceptance that school is not a solitary game, that many other people besides myself participate in it. By imagining a student on the first day of school, many of us fall into thinking about someone intimidated who does not know if they will be able to adjust to it: a withdrawn girl or boy who has abandoned their mother’s arms and wants to go back to her. In the middle of the crowd, they would like this just to be a bad dream.
Somehow the child also knows he or she belongs to this new world. Once again, the origin of words can help us understand what happens to the little one. To belong (from a Latin word which means “to be of something or someone”) has connotations of ownership. Indeed, one of the things that frighten almost all of us irrationally on the first day of school is that this new community, both attractive and threatening, will overtake us, absorb us.
It devours us. Immediately I am reminded of the myth about the Labyrinth of Crete and the group of young people who at certain times had to go there to feed the Minotaur, a creature with a human body and a beast’s head. Doesn’t that seem a lot like school? Don’t we suddenly feel like our parents had abandoned us there, as an offering to inhuman society, or rather, semi-human?
Society is a devourer of children. (The corridors of that Labyrinth of Crete certainly were filled with the bones of those poor little chaps sacrificed). Our little one, who before enjoyed a protected place in his home, is now thrown into this environment that threatens to eat him up. It is then that a teacher approaches to comfort him, ask him a question, or take him by his hand to his class, and little by little, from the depths of his soul, arises the great hero who defeated the Minotaur: Theseus.
Theseus was the son of a king, and through his courage and strength, he was able to slit the monster’s throat and return home. He was helped by Daedal’s wit (the inventor who came up with the idea of tying a cord at the entrance to the labyrinth), especially by the love of Ariadna, who worried about his life.
At the end of the day, the school community does not devour us. On the contrary, in the same spirit of belonging (or impertinent belonging), someone imposes on the child the appropriate mythology to survive. Many victims, heroines and heroes, will unite from that first day of classes, facing each other, loving some, befriending others, becoming leaders or followers, and journey through the labyrinth to kill the monster. The paths are many: strength, wit, seduction – seduced by beauty and power, money, intelligence, humor, submission, complicity, words. There will be attack and defense involving subversion, recklessness, cynicism, theft, commerce, poetry.
Supremacy of the strongest? Not only that. Also, cooperation, or better said, almost always that combination of supremacy and cooperation given the name of…
(Before saying the name, I want to open a parenthesis and explain that I will conclude this article specifying one of the many types of interaction that occur in school, one that has become very relevant and that I believe should be treated with care)
… the name “bullying.”
On the bully’s image (which means, among other things, thug or hothead), we have poured all our rage. To a large extent, we are right to do so. Some glossaries define “bullying” as behavior that wants to harm another. However, (and this is the delicate thing about the matter), I believe we are obliged to mark a dividing line between an extra-curricular destructive ritual (in which a person irreversibly harms another or part of another) and the school ritual, which operates to mobilize the abilities of its members, including, of course, aggression, defense, wit and self-esteem. (“Bully” also means “swashbuckler.”)
The educational work involved in this second type of bullying does not lie in equalizing children’s abilities or resources but in allowing opponents (all vulnerable in different ways) to face and confront their differences. Simultaneously, teachers must remain vigilant to confirm that the opponents’ social skills are truly put into play. There might be times when they must intervene to make all safe from mishandling their resources. However, they must also allow them to continue (with certain limits, to prevent the slightest irreversible damage from occurring, mental and psychological).
The school is the second home and the first society. In school, one learns to conquer their territory thanks to countless resources ranging from imposing one’s presence to achieving invisibility wearing a magic cloak, like in the fairytales. If, unfortunately, that conquest does not happen (because the medium is exceeded or our tools are insufficient), it will be much harder to participate in the second society’s rituals that await us beyond. Hence, the vital transcendence of that rehearsal, preparatory, and more or less theatrical labyrinth, called “school.”
Translation by Daniel Wetta.
Disclaimer: This is an Op-ed article. The viewpoints expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints, and official policies of Tecnológico de Monterrey.
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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 
