Let's go!

Can a foot turn into a telephone? And a spoon, into a sophisticated graphic design tool? Everybody knows children like to use common objects in what may seem to adults unsuspected, absurd and incomprehensible ways. In due time, they are –almost always– finally persuaded to follow reason and abandon their impossible dreams. It is necessary for them to adapt to the real world –we say–, and so we stuff them up with our own particular "reality show", and make them forget that other possible world they held inside.


But all that which we deny them –for their own good, to be sure, so they will become women and men of substance– is precisely that which has enabled human societies to imagine, create and recreate themselves. To understand is to invent, Piaget said. In the 21st century, the "real world" can change at the speed of a mouse-click, and knowledge is so vast that the only thing that can save us from ignorance is to preserve our hunger for discovery.


Thus schools have reached an impasse, call it burn-out syndrome, attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity, failure and drop-out, bullying, lack of democracy, staff ratios, irrational cut-downs, Wert Act (in Spain), and a pedagogical method which is obsolete and more than questionable. Must all this be so? Can´t it be any other way? Following the example of children, we would like to dare to imagine a different kind of school, which may already exist, or may be something yet to be invented. A school that´s not like the ones we know, strongholds of a numbed society. Instead, a school that will return to its origin as the Greeks' scholé, where cultivating the spirit, freedom and a space or creation were essential. A school capable of crossing its own boundaries and daring to be something unkown, like a child that only pretending to be a bird will dare to fly.