Opinion | The School Ritual: Utopia, Truth, and Spirituality in the Face of the Pandemic – Observatory of Educational Innovation

In Mexico, we call the tasks that fall to us unexpectedly and must be attended urgently a "bomberazo" (a term similar to "bombshell" in English). For any work team, the first bombshells usually correspond to unforeseen events or information. However, this way of solving problems tends to take hold as a modus operandi among us. Too readily, we become accustomed to postponing essential things until they become urgent. Perhaps it is because goods are not plentiful, so we prefer to wait until the task in question proves to be truly necessary. Yes, maybe it all reduces to a resource economy.

The world at large experienced the pandemic as a highly contagious and lethal virus that fell on humanity overnight; we had to rush to cope with the disaster, firehose in hand. Without prior warning, we learned to be at home 24 hours a day, wash our hands frequently, wear masks, distance ourselves from others, and do our activities remotely. (Unfortunately, many also had to learn to lose their loved ones, jobs, lifestyles).

However, the arrival of the pandemic was not truly new and unexpected; it had been anticipated many years, all over the world. As evidence of this that I found in my personal library, in 2009, Dr. Octavio Gmez Dants warned about the subject in an article published in a high-circulation, prestigious journal. That same year, another university science magazine titled one of its covers "The Foreseen Epidemic." Likewise, the title of a 2015 book demonstrates what I am saying: The Mexican Influenza and the Coming Pandemic. In it, six authors announced that a global health catastrophe such as the one we are experiencing was looming over us.

So why was nothing done to prevent this? In daydreams, we can go back a few years and imagine leaders meeting worldwide to resolve future pandemics: UN-type congresses where measures would be dictated to reduce the expected impact; economic agreements, legal briefs, information campaigns, hospital prevention protocols, virtual technology development.

From this imaginary congress, international organizations in the field of education, such as UNESCO, would call on school systems around the world to develop prevention content and practices and to leverage the unstoppable influx of electronic media to organize preventively, logistically and technologically, the deployment of emergency remote education (as Fernanda Ibez taught us to call it in an article published here). Then they would have had years to run training drills with students and teachers and develop teaching strategies, health prevention measures, instructions for the use of masks, and healthy distancing.

Why then was nothing done?

Vctor Briones, professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, explains it to us in two words: all this preparation "is expensive." Just hearing this, deep indignation grips us: How expensive could it be compared to the costs of sacrificing the world's population and (speaking of our field now) forcing the entire educational community to become experts in remote teaching from one moment to the next? The teacher Maya Niro rightly calls all this a shipwreck: "At that moment, I boarded a ship in the middle of a storm, where I was given a different rudder than the one I knew how to maneuver."

Con rabia e impotencia imagina uno a los gobiernos de todo el mundo pasando en silencio la estafeta a sus sucesores o ms que la estafeta, la pistola de una ruleta rusa que llevaba dentro un virus que pondra a toda la humanidad contra las cuerdas.

With rage and impotence, one imagines the governments of the whole world silently passing the baton to their successors or, worse than that, the Russian roulette wheel pistol that the virus carries to put all humanity against the ropes.

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However, the anger wanes when Briones' response reveals its realism. Calm returns. We understand then that by saying "expensive," the analyst is talking about an incomprehensible "expensive," not only in money, time and effort, but also in risk: risk for the greatest economic and political interests, yes, but also emotional and mental risk for the world's population in the face of the news. The announcement that (who knows when) a catastrophe will occur may generate immense anguish for some, more than the event itself. At the end of it all, we can foresee a wave of intense disagreements, confrontations, and conflicts coming, possibly even social chaos. In those circumstances, preventing and preparing ourselves could be a disaster.

Perhaps, despite supposed human rationality, our coordinating such an event would be as tricky as getting the world's bees to organize in the face of the threat of climate change.

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A new blow against the rudder: What if world leaders then decided to let the pandemic come and function a bit as a "drill" for other health crises that are expected to arrive soon? Just thinking about it, anger and horror return: a thousand conspiracy theories come to mind, distrust of the authorities (including the scientists) grows, and pseudoscientific proposals, rejection of the medical/hospital system and vaccines, and alternative treatments are talked about with great hope. Finally, against this background of indignation, resignation, and painful doubts, the image remains of a group of leaders waiting year after year for the appearance of patient zero to sound the world alarm and call on us all (right now!) to put out the fire.

If action had been taken in these two decades, if world leaders had decided to prevent and prepare people for a possible pandemic, if they had organized international meetings and emergency remote education drills, everyone in the world would have ended up asking the crucial question: why is a pandemic inevitable? Then we would have turned with distressing alarm to the corners of the planet that, for the moment, prefer to remain hidden. Thousands of industries shred the planetary ecosystems, disturbing, among other things, animal coexistence and boosting the proliferation and diversification of viruses.

Dr. Julio Frenk, former Secretary of Health of Mexico and current rector of the University of Miami, has not tired of repeating that the COVID-19 pandemic is a phenomenon that has its origin in human activity. In an interview in the magazine CONECTA of Tec de Monterrey, he emphatically summarizes: "Pandemics are not natural events; they are anthropogenic, reflecting inhumane practices."

Peter Daszak, president of Ecohealth Alliance, confirms, "There is no great mystery about the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic or any modern pandemic. Human activities that drive climate change and biodiversity loss also generate pandemic risks through their impact on our environment.

The problem is more or less this: There are more animals with contagious diseases. The more they reproduce and coexist, the more variants of viruses emerge, and the more likely it is that one of these will be highly contagious and lethal to humans. The same happens when an ecosystem is destroyed, and animals migrate and concentrate in habitats where healthy distancing is impossible and viral contagion increases. Historically, the issue boils down to the fact that while animal husbandry was performed in small jacals by a few people, the chances of a deadly disease emerging were slim. However, when we talk about a virus mutating and spreading among a huge herd of pigs on an industrial-meat-production farm staffed by hundreds of people (as occurs now in many parts of the world) or thousands of bats cornered in a cave in China for having lost their forests, then it is more likely that a homicidal viral mutation will emerge.

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To the above, let us add a human population that lives in narrow spaces in an overcrowded locality, to which come all kinds of rodents, birds and primates seeking better living conditions. Let us say that these people also tend to eat meat, often wild animals, and they attend bullfights or cockfights. They frequent markets with live animals, hunt or traffic fauna, make fur coats, perform rituals, or practice traditional medicine with animals. Some have weak immune systems due to poor nutrition. They live in poor hygiene conditions, work in cleaning and sanitation, and do not have access to adequate health services. In addition, to top it all, many of them (rich and poor) travel through their country or cross borders into super-congested land and air transport hubs. When these things happen, the greater is the creation of lethal viruses and the shorter the time they spread throughout the world. These factors are what epidemiologists have been studying since the last century, and they have come to make significantly reliable forecasts.

On all of the above, Dr. Julio Frenk can assure that the COVID-19 pandemic is man-made. Indeed, we are not victims. When we refer to the possibility that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was created in a laboratory, we can believe that it is true because humans have turned nature into an immense laboratory where the creation of lethal viruses is already a tremendous probability.

Knowing all this, what can the school do with so much and so crude information? Indeed, the first thing we want is to leave the question asked and run away. Haven't we gone through enough? Because in the challenging and terrible present, the school seems to be thwarted; it has come undone. We have had to adapt to a model without physical coexistence. We encounter faces without bodies in virtual classrooms where the air is not shared; we listen to breathless voices and pour our presence through electronic cables, resenting everywhere the lack of resources. The three dimensions of space have been replaced by two, by one, by zero (many students have not been able to receive any classes and can only wait for the day to return to school).

The tension of the Zoom classes leads to socialization to which we are not accustomed. Teachers regret having to communicate with their students through a screen. Girls and boys have stopped touching and running together. That absence of touch, that lack of physical simultaneity, seems to have detracted from the tri-dimensionality of the world, causing a kind of desiccation of the environment and even a painful habit of isolation.

On the monitor, what we know as a "class" becomes a mosaic, a mural. It is almost impossible to establish complicities; the teacher's management is hindered. "Now the teachers (Paulette Delgado reminds us ) are distanced from their students, which can trigger anxiety from not knowing how they are and impotence from not being able to help them."

Technologies are still not advanced enough to allow that chaos of voices that brings the classroom to life when everyone speaks at the same time. There is no complete sensory perception; everything is limited to the visual and auditory senses. We only have a two-dimensional appreciation of others.

In short, the loss of the collective and private spaces that are part of school socialization prevails.

However, despite all this, we decide to be brave and stop to think a little. Is face-to-face socialization truly the only one possible? Is there another that we have somehow neglected? Suddenly, an answer comes to mind. It has to do with the school ritual.

First, let us recall the idea of the philosopher Emil Wittgenstein that our language contains complete mythology. It seems to me that this means, for example, that knowing "I am part of a school" (whether online or remote) enrolls me in a learning community where multiple social roles are played. The entire personality is engaged and exercised. In that mythological community, we are sometimes heroes, sometimes wise, sometimes villains, and we buzz from order to disorder, attracted by a common goal that gives meaning to our encounter

Today, when it is difficult to perceive reality and understand what we can do with it, the school still thrives in that role play, perhaps more mobilized than ever to give its very detailed response. Language and mythology are in a state of freedom and freshness that allows processing the harsh reality with incomparable spontaneity.

At the beginning of the pandemic, there was the possibility of not going back to school even virtually and having to abandon everything until further notice. All the community members cried out with the courage of heroes who wanted to continue, and they did whatever was necessary to achieve it. They discovered a new and powerful form of socialization: they confirmed as never before that they belong to that convulsed world, not as victims but as beings whom the planet needs and awaits something. They are active; they resist; they respond indignantly and compassionately like heroes of shared mythology who advance toward a joint and deep dialogue.

A dialogue not only among them and with the rest of humanity, but with nature, to which we believed we had imposed our discourse and it has reacted. Nature, which made us intelligent and from which we have passed prepared. Today the kids are inwardly debating the enduring belief that we own every environment. They are beginning to understand themselves as biological beings, sensitive and immersed in a painful but empathetic existence and search for meaning. They are together, learning and trembling. Avoiding triumphalism, they maintain utopia, fulfilling what the writer Eduardo Galeano teaches that this is not something that is attained but something to guide us in our progress.

Today young people see each other, touch each other at least imaginatively, feeling that something common among them exists. They dream of feats in which they take risks, are endangered, and even die and are resurrected several times. All their inner mythology buzzes. In many ways, they sense that what happens externally also happens inside them, and they ultimately take the truth of their time into their hands because, as sad as it is, it is still their truth.

In school, the call to truth puts into conversation all our ideas, superstitions, and beliefs, aligns them, and attracts them to a place where they fit, including even the conspiratorial and pseudoscientific. Already in that place, which we call "dialogue," teachers can lead them little by little until they begin to glimpse a common truth.

Thus, the students have become aware that what we are experiencing now is almost certain to happen again. (The tycoon Bill Gates, with all the information he can access, has stated that a new pandemic can arrive between three and 20 years). Today, hurrying to impulse changes that reduce the risk of pandemics, among other things, students inform one another and discuss how to convince governments to invest resources in disease prevention, even not knowing if or when the diseases will arrive (finally, understanding that letting them come can be much more expensive than preventing them). They inquire and discuss how to strengthen global health systems and basic hygiene; how to create and promote forms of production that do not overcrowd spaces or hoard resources in the hands of a few. They seek to prevent the rise in family well-being from becoming synonymous with over-consumption of meat (as occurs throughout the world) and, simultaneously, reduce industrial livestock, which in addition to being cruel, requires massive deforestations (such as the recent ones in the Amazon), also causing a catastrophic emission of greenhouse gases.

2020 and 2021 are not lost years; they are saved years, saved by and for schools. More than ever, we are a community (global, as if that were not enough) searching for a balance between what we want and what we really can and should want, understanding as the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater explains that the destiny of others is our own.

In school, Truth is a call more than a conclusion; we are summoned to it by the school bell. But what will that truth look like? It is only out of curiosity that we ask ourselves this question because we know how difficult it will be to answer. Nevertheless, we want to imagine a little, together, the kind of truth we can conceive in this threatened but hopeful present we have described.

The first indication of an answer is found in the increasingly visible presence of the so-called "false sciences" or pseudosciences. It is a fact that, with the pandemic, this presence demonstrated its global dimensions, exploding in a kind of boom that many scientists are beginning to seriously fear. We have all seen astrological or conspiratorial theories sprout about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 treatments that science says not been studied with sufficient rigor or are flat-out fiction.

My opinion is that, however far-fetched they may be, these positions come to occupy a space that reason, and especially scientific thought, tend to abandon. I refer to that delicate terrain where objectivity and something we can call "spirituality" go hand in hand.

Many people of science claim that their certainties are the only reliable knowledge. They argue that having been proven, we should rely only on them if we want to make good decisions (this includes the non-exact sciences, such as psychology and pedagogy). How can we not listen to them if, with methodical idealism, they claim that there is an ultimate truth that is not only affordable but verifiable? The prestigious popularizer Brian Greene, for example, states that the so-called String Theory may soon solve the central enigma of the universe. Saying one can determine Truth indeed seems a conceited, know-it-all stance, but we must recognize that in a world where most of us feel like carriers of the truth, those who limit themselves to what they can see seem humble.

Of course, it is also true that as the writer, G. K. Chesterton, says with fine irony some of these scientists are "very proud of their humility." Many of them, and their supporters, occasionally overstep their bounds and claim that, apart from their own, there is no other true knowledge. Daniel C. Dennet, a famous rationalist philosopher, states that "nothing we want to address can be beyond the limits of science." God, spirituality, and such things must be addressed as cultural phenomena that can be explained with scientific studies on evolution and the brain (Dennet is known worldwide as one of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism.)

It is the old philosophical problem one of the first between two tendencies: that of "forcing life, life as a whole, (to follow) the destiny of knowledge," as the philosopher Mara Zambrano points out, and that of accepting that something exists beyond reason we can access by other means: toward reason, toward the reasonable Erich Fromm explains to us: it is up to man to admit his limitations and to know that "we will never capture the secrets of man and the universe, but we can know them, nevertheless," in other ways.

It is surprising to learn that some of the most influential theories that deny that total truth can be achieved come from Science itself. Without needing to believe in "an afterlife," experts like Niels Bohr (whose atomic model we studied in high school) have shown that the most here is not as "true" as believed. Eugene Wigner, Nobel Laureate in Physics, flatly states that it is impossible to explain reality without referring to infinite cosmic consciousness.

This brings us face to face with the question of how the educational field should approach the issue of scientific truth and its not-always-humble opposition to the so-called "spiritual." To summarize, I believe that school truth, while retaining its scientific inclination, must return to forms of knowledge such as those that Fromm describes. (In one of his most famous books, he refers specifically to knowledge through Love). And suppose we, the supporters of science (starting in the school itself), do not reasonably approach the field where the explainable and the inexplicable are linked. In that case, we will allow all kinds of conflicting ideas to take over that territory. Yes, as long as rational knowledge continues to pretend that it has the last word without admitting its limits or honoring the place that corresponds to the spiritual with true humility; if reason refuses to reach out "beyond" itself, envisioning continuity between reason and mystery, then it will be leaving that corner vacant and encouraging opportunistic positions to occupy it, some of them perhaps only nave, wanting to safeguard the delicate link with superstitions.

In the debate between science and belief (we might better say "open litigation"), the school has remained on the sidelines, no doubt respecting the scientific criterion but presenting itself at the same time as neutral where the other side is concerned. However, let us trust that the classrooms will increasingly become the site of reconciliation, elevating the search for truth to other realities where, being well-grounded, we can flourish.

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Opinion | The School Ritual: Utopia, Truth, and Spirituality in the Face of the Pandemic - Observatory of Educational Innovation