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In this complicated world, the school draws on its oldest and most enduring components to serve as a social cohesive. These components form an ancestral ritual that has found a way to preserve itself since ancient times. In it, learning is experienced as a game; the community comprising it functions as a genuine laboratory of social roles experimented in all forms of cultural relationships; in addition, the call to truth issues as its spearhead, which all the members of that community adopt as a common goal, flowing together, not homogeneously but often with turbulent energy. This energy finds its channel via a fourth ritual component: discipline, which envelops and gives shape to a dynamic, not static, form. The channel is mobile and changing, firm and flexible, whose main attribute is creatively containing the community.
In addition to these four components, a fifth element insists on knocking on the door and participating in this legendary ritual. I am speaking of human communication. Giving it place can spark controversy. Byung-Chul Han (the now indispensable Korean philosopher) speaks of Eastern rituals as merely formal acts that unite a community without the need for communication among its members. They repeat millenary gestures whose meaning, if it ever existed, has been lost in time.
It is difficult for Westerners to conceive of human beings banding together without any message circulating among them (even a beginning one of the will to be together). Undoubtedly, we fully identify with that vision of the mid-twentieth century, categorically decreeing that everything communicates (everything absolutely, either consciously or unconsciously). In addition, we have made profoundly ours the idea that communication opens for us the opportunity to advance and grow. Han’s vision and this idea that everything communicates, each with its successes, show the need to question both the scope of communication that always propels us forward and the repetitions of ritual, which summon us to the past, to the origin.
Decomposition
However ancestral they may be, the components of the school ritual are tested day by day by everyday reality. As for the game, everything students study in school (which could be a source of great pleasure) threatens to become tedious and discouraging to the most enthusiastic. (David Strogatz, a pleasant popularizer like few others, places the mathematics learned in school on the “serious” side of that discipline, leaving it out of the playful arenas of more fun spaces). Also, the exercise of social roles, which could make us true experts in relationships with others, often becomes an artificial interaction, even cruel, capable of violating our social skills. Likewise, the call to truth, which leads us along the path of knowledge, revealing to us its limits and helping us to live with uncertainty, becomes, instead, a call to universal law, the only authentic way of knowing, which promises us a finished world, a definitive truth. In this world of fixed purposes, discipline can become a binding gag and, in many cases (increasingly), a self-flagellating whip, self-channeling and impeding us from the natural process of moving between light and darkness, the straight and the off-center, routine and adventure, protection and risk.
The sixth component
Humans are antinomic beings: We issue two or more opposite truths from each thing. We can more or less cope with this in our human relationships, political opinions, religious beliefs, and matters of philosophy and art; however, it becomes genuinely catastrophic when we find mutually exclusive laws even in exact sciences. Such has been demonstrated in quantum and classical physics, which are opposed. (Scientists affirm that it is only a question of time before this antinomy is resolved and the unity of all existence is recomposed, but as explained by the Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Eugene Wigner, nothing guarantees that scientific antinomies will one day disappear.)
In an effort to rescue our rationality, Edgar Morin develops the theory of complexity, starting from the fact that we are in an archipelago of certainties surrounded by an ocean of uncertainty. For him, as I understand it, human beings can use these scarce certainties to build rafts to venture into a sea whose laws are unknown to us (an enterprise that, at least for me, bears a remarkable resemblance to the Homeric Odyssey). Søren Kierkegaard, perhaps more realistic (although it seems a joke to say it), speaks of leaps of faith into the void, thanks to which the vast sea becomes navigable. A similar circus image is that of “jump and the net will appear,” which some attribute to Zen wisdom.
For his part, Erich Fromm thinks that only Love (the mysterious fusion of different realities that does not lose what is essential in each) can relieve reason when it dashes against its limits. According to him, if reason is truly reasonable, it voluntarily surrenders the stake of knowledge to that invisible relay. If following these ideas, we give love a place among the components of ritual, we find in it the ability to recompose the essence of the scholastic when it faces a daily life very unfamiliar with uncertainty.
To be clear, in my vision, love is far from an exclusively protective and debilitating feeling. I want to resort first to its image as a force capable of questioning everything, questioning all to the ultimate consequences without destroying, but on the contrary, infinitely affirming its integrity within a process of dialogue. Thus, faced with a type of teaching/learning that aspires to master reality and accumulate certainty for the sake of perfect knowledge, love enhances the value of learning in itself, as a game, discovering in the unproductive a powerful source of meaning for our lives. (Not doing, not intervening to modify reality is the basis of one of the oldest and most valid philosophies in our days: Taoism. If the reader does not recognize the currency of this name, think of one of its fundamental concepts, the Yin-Yang). Love comforts us and allows us to loosen the forces where the frustration of not being complete beings, instead, being a whole that lacks something, terrifies us.
At the same time, love is on guard that we do not renounce all productive knowledge and develop a new addiction from the game: the addiction of participating, that is, feeling part of the community and losing our individuality, eager to always participate; to lose ourselves in the meaning of the whole and sacrifice our own. Love reactivates us and takes us away from the need to disperse ourselves in the whole to finally get rid of that obligation that haunts us so much: that of being someone. It is well known that the premise that sustains the success of casinos is that the vast majority of players only like winning so they can keep playing. However, the good player has a plan for himself, which allows him to quit when ahead. Love is a back-and-forth between a self that becomes more and more enclosed in its inner potential and a self that is anxious to extricate from an infinite game.
If we speak now about exercising social roles, love knows, respects, and cares for others; it rejoices with them and accompanies them to unsuspected precipices or responds to them with excessive anger and rejection without ever destroying them. The educator’s love allows the students to develop in every way, with mul
tiple emotions, ideas, intentions, and words, providing motivation and safeguards. It protects and offers freedom. It is attentive, caretaking. It responds to what the student has done. It sets limits (sometimes drastic and even dramatic) when necessary. (In the case of bullying, love – attentive and questioning – identifies both overt and passive aggression; the latter can be as destructive as the first).
As for the call to truth, love (as we have said) allows knowledge to be valued for itself, as a game, and as a reason for union. Play is unifying, and social exchange is confrontational; for its part, the call to truth causes both energies to converge towards a point, bringing us together. It once again builds a unifying bond among us, not to invigorate the craving to know (or any other anxiety) but to allow us to disseminate our knowledge in the understanding that all truth is shared. In this dialogue, science (which has always wanted to bestow common truths upon us) is perfectly welcome as a participant. In reality, we can all turn to it; the call only requests “authenticity” from each of us, that is, correspondence between thinking, feeling, and acting.
(To be continued)
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 
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