Opinion | The School Ritual: From Uncertainty to Truth (or vice-versa?)

I want to begin this essay by expressing my admiration for all school community members. Their perseverance in maintaining the school at all costs during the COVID-19 pandemic made it possible to preserve social cohesion throughout the past year, all over the planet.

At every age, society asks school education to teach its members the necessary technical skills of the moment. However, beyond this, school also transmits a spirit of belonging and ancestral cohesiveness that is carried out through what I have called (in several essays) the school ritual.

This ritual goes beyond conscious intention and begins to be fulfilled by the simple fact that a school summons the community to its classrooms. It does not matter if that community is a small town or the entire world (online education has favored the latter as never before). It does not matter whether the members meet daily in person or occasionally and remotely. (See The educational ritual during the pandemic). The only thing that matters is the creation of a space where people can meet.

Why do people meet in this place? What exactly does the school convene? That is the crucial question and the one into which I delve in this series of short essays.

Truth

I found that the school ritual has several components – and this arises from the etymology of the word “school,” which means “leisure:” First of all, school is a place of rest and play. (See The school ritual: learning as a game). However, it also allows us to display conscious and unconscious intentions – attraction, rejection, cooperation, and competition – towards every member who participates. It allows us to exercise and mold that mythology that, according to the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is contained in the language. (See The school ritual: mythology).

However, the main component we immediately identify is the need to learn, which, simplifying, we call curiosity or desire for knowledge.

Everything begins, as I have said, with the gathering of students and teachers. As soon as we go through the school gate, we apply the various and hidden mythologies that our language and thought contain. Everywhere that infinity of children and adults jump, run, fly, doing all kinds of things, agitated, scattered, making it more evident than ever that each head is a world. Let us hear the biblical Genesis: “In the beginning was the schoolyard.” Doesn’t it say so? Isn’t this the best image of primeval chaos? Nothing has a beginning, a middle, or an end, nor is there a hint of an objective or function.

And yet God said, “Let the school bell ring!”

Rarely do we have the opportunity to witness the passage from disorder to order as in that schoolyard. When the bell rings, the community is instantly visible. Joking aside, I think that the essence of the school ritual is represented in that bell in some way. School is, above all, a call to know the truth.

There is no school without truth, without a call to truth. More than anywhere else, is there where there are those moments when certainty envelops us, reassuring and dazzling. We learn to doodle with a pencil and give it meaning, and we verify that others understand it. The same thing happens if we add two plus two or learn a new word: the result is something that others share. There are no longer only assumptions and imagination: there is the truth; we verify it. As María Zambrano says about what happened when Plato’s philosophy arrived in human consciousness: “For the first time, there was thought about what felt so darkly. The symbols became clear thoughts, and ideas succeeded the mysteries.”

Anxiety

However, from where does the need to learn come? Why do we value that truth so much?

The reality we live in is mysterious. Its mystery, however, is not comparable to a dark space that we feel we can clear. There is something else, a profound contradiction, a kind of doubt about whether what we see around us really exists, and even whether we are here. I will explain.

One of the first questions I remember asking myself at the beginning of puberty was: “If the physical universe I live in has an end, what lies beyond it?” The answer led me to imagine “Nothingness,” which was impossible. Nevertheless, when I tried to imagine a universe that would never end, my fantasy would stop abruptly without moving beyond a certain point. An infinite universe was also unimaginable.

I tried again and again to solve the enigma, but I always fell into contradiction. While I knew that there was no solution for it, I did not lose hope of one day finding the answer. Only in recent times did I learn that this and similar problems about the universe (Kant calls them antinomies) are important philosophical questions that, being at the core of human understanding, have no solution. Instead, they have two contradictory solutions; they allow two opposite “truths” and leave us in the hurricane of uncertainty.

The antinomies and the anguish the contradictions generate have been present throughout human history. Fortunately, language, mythology, and rituals of cohesion integrate us into a habitable world endowed with what we call truth. We usually walk through it as a paradise in which the finite and the infinite coexist; the united and the separate are the same. However, without our knowledge of why, a feeling of loss and incompleteness eternally returns. Myths, rituals, and our ways of being in that ideal world do not seem to be enough.

Experimentation

Each historical stage has its truth and its “school” spaces to make it familiar to all: the mythical ages and stories around the fire; Platonic reasoning and academia, the Thomas faith and the university, are all ways in which the school is changing, without ever losing the link to that original contradiction, the comfort that the truth grants, and the original teaching rituals.

The history of the modern school begins one morning in 1581 in the Cathedral of Pisa when the young Galileo Galilei had a kind of revelation, an epiphany that would change the way of thinking and seeing the world. It was not God who caused him that rapture but the presence of another Almighty, one who was materially present and subject to laws of nature. I am referring (and forgive me for the joke) to the “very tall chandelier” that hung from the dome and that a sacristan had made swing pendulously.

Galilei thought he observed that, although the object traveled a shorter and shorter distance each swing, it took precisely the same time in each. It was absurd! However, instead of exclaiming “miracle!” or run away, the boy did something unusual for the time: he began experimenting. Using his pulse to measure time, he discovered that what
he observed about the swinging chandelier was true.

The Galilean experimental method had many rivals (including the Inquisition), and schools throughout this period suffered a crisis of uncertainty. Finally, when science gained legitimacy in 1781 with the ideas published by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, things began to stabilize (it is amusing to see that it was exactly two hundred years later).

Kant found a new truth that soon permeated the entire West. He demonstrated that human beings could bring together – with and in our reason – all the facts of the universe. The success of this idea finally forged the rationalism of the modern age, with which scientific knowledge increasingly substituted for truth in the school ritual. Now the students would go to the classrooms and laboratories and explore nature as the only reality. Little by little, they would understand that the only knowledge we obtain comes from relating the concepts of reality to each other, and (what interests us most at this moment) they would experience that with this new way of thinking, the antinomies lost all validity and the anguish magically disappeared. Kant had explained it: antinomies are concepts about a Whole (the whole universe), and since there is only one Whole, we will never find anything outside of it.

This was enough to see a meaningful unity in everything that exists. Thanks to science, the feeling of incompleteness – which came from a dark past – would direct its arrow toward a bright future, making constant progress. The truths would arrive thanks to the gradual work of proven discoveries, and human beings would advance from generation to generation towards that realm of evident realities. The time had come – as the María Zambrano says – “to force life to (follow) the destiny of knowledge.”

In school, children should only trust truths that could be observed and verified because only that method guaranteed peace of mind. Few expressed the new faith as clearly as David Hilbert did when George Cantor published the Theory of Sets that underpins modern mathematics: “Now no one will expel us from the paradise that Cantor has opened.”

A deeper truth

At the beginning of the 20th century, when the Theory of Relativity had just been demonstrated, a group of French and German scientists gave birth to new science, as valid and proven as any other but which put uncertainty at the center of knowledge. This is not the place to talk about this discipline, which was given the name of quantum mechanics (and which is the basis of technologies such as lasers, fiber optics, magnetic resonance imaging, and GPS). Suffice to say that their conclusions about the behavior of the subatomic world contradicted everything that had been proven until then by classical physics (Einstein vs. Newton) about the functioning of the macroscopic world, the world of molecules, living beings, and the rest of the universe.

With the arrival of these discoveries, two truths that did not agree were exposed to the world; now, there were two separate worlds governed by different laws. Scientists were not used to such oddities. Two opposite truths? Theoretical physicist Sylvester J. Gates Jr. described this crisis perfectly: “The laws of nature are supposed to hold everywhere, so if both Einstein’s theories and quantum mechanics hold true, it turns out that we have two different forevers.”

The antinomies returned. Science could not answer everything with rational certainty. Years earlier, Thomas H. Huxley, Darwin’s renowned biologist, had also rejected the view of some of his colleagues that inert matter in the brain can produce thoughts. “How can such a remarkable thing as a state of consciousness arise from irritated nervous tissue? It is as inexplicable as a genie appearing when Aladdin rubs the lamp”. In another field, many flatly deny the current mathematical version that nothing can be the cause of everything that exists. “If you believe that the universe could come out of nothing, then you have more faith than I do,” said some believer.

In 1910, the great Mexican thinker and teacher Justo Sierra, in his inauguration speech at the National University of Mexico, summarized the criteria that would come to govern modern schools: “We ask science for the last word of the real, and it answers us, but it always gives us the next-to-last word.”

The 20th century would seek the last pedagogical word in multiple experiments. It is unnecessary to list the number of trends of thought from Piaget to the New Age and postmodernism, as the ideal of rational knowledge wanted to prevail. Finally, in 1999, as if to put a full stop to the discussion, the French philosopher and pedagogue Edgar Morin, creator of the theories of complex thought, set out among the seven essential concepts necessary for the education of the future the idea that “knowing” is navigating through archipelagos of certainties into an ocean of uncertainties. Shortly afterward, in his book The Road to Reality, the Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Roger Penrose, published forceful paragraphs, admitting that perhaps beyond physics, mathematics, and psychology, there is a “more profound truth, of which we have very little idea at the moment. “

In recent years, the school has also begun to position itself at the apex of the apparent conflict between understanding and mystery. Ultimately the question is: today, at school, for what purpose does the school bell ring? To answer this, we must consider what we learned during the COVID-19 pandemic. Forcing ourselves to prioritize our resources radically has helped us glimpse the essential components of that school ritual in which we continue seeking social cohesion so eagerly.

Let us put aside particular interests to concentrate on what has been vital this year: meetings with other people beyond the family bosom, learning as a game, rest from the routine of effort, and a type of coexistence where we can take on new roles and continue to know and shape ourselves…

And as for the truth?

In his prose poem The Teacher of Wisdom, Oscar Wilde tells us of a wise man who possesses the perfect knowledge of God, which he treasures in silence. One day he meets a wicked and beautiful thief and is filled with compassion for him. Abusing that compassion, the young man threatens to lose himself in sin if the sage does not reveal the divine secret. The wise man succumbs and whispers the knowledge of God in the young man’s ear, becoming empty as he does so. Finally, in tears, he sees that someone is standing next to him, an angel: “Until now, you have had the perfect knowledge of God,” the angel says. “From now on, you will have the perfect love of God. Why are you crying?”

The renunciation of perfect knowledge and its replacement by love is taken up by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in his book The Art of Loving. He explains that the feeling of completeness/incompleteness associated with human consciousness only finds a solution in loving union with other beings (or, from a religious point of view, with God). This solution is not in any way irrational but on the contrary, it is the “boldest and most radical” consequence of rationalism: Reason, he explains, is capable of knowing limitations and that “we will never grasp the secret of man and the universe, but that we can know it, nevertheless, in the act of loving.”

The forms of this union and which ones are presented in the school ritual are topics to continue reflecting upon. For now, following Fromm, I’ll dd that the school’s mission is the same as always, to call for the truth. Not the truth that finds its limits in science but a “deeper” truth where the knowledge of communion occupies a preponderant place. Firmly perched on islands of certainty, the school community can begin to jump into the ocean of uncertainty with “bold and radical” confidence that the sea – and love – are also part of our essence.

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.

Andrés García Barrios Writer and communicator. His work brings together experience in numerous disciplines, almost always with an educational focus: theater, novel, short story, essay, television series and museum exhibitions. He is a contributor to the Sciences magazines of the Faculty of Sciences of the UNAM; Casa del Tiempo, from the Autonomous Metropolitan University, and Tierra Adentro, from the Ministry of Culture. Contact: andresgarciabarrios@gmail.com

Share

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