I do not forget that firstly of the pandemic, a thousand concepts circulated all over the world on the completely different faculty options that might be adopted within the new context. Some have advised that youngsters drop out of faculty and dedicate their time to studying about family chores and household coexistence. These of us who for a second flirted with this concept had been shortly overwhelmed by the initiative of the establishments which, fortuitously, reopened the programs and summoned the scholar group to conclude the college yr.

The entire of society was apprehended from persevering with to show usually. Avoiding the temptation to subvert every part to emulate the chaos of the pandemic, instructional establishments clung to what they had been doing, first embracing the crucial of wholesome distancing, then coping with the shortage of instruments strategies and the continued failures of these they’d. By way of tv, radio, zoom, e-mail and every kind of digital messages, and even personally bringing the mandatory supplies to the scholars to proceed the teachings, thousands and thousands of educators have carried the college establishment on their shoulders. . They had been impressed, I imagine, by instinct of a deep worth to which they might and may honor all through the disaster.

It took me some time to determine and title this deep worth that was floating round within the atmosphere. In the present day, I believe I can name it “the ritual essence of training”, an essence that dates again to the primary look of people and which remains to be current at the moment below the heap of “improvements”. Which have amassed all through historical past. Just like the fairytale princess who perceives the pea below dozens of mattresses, educators in 2020 had been in a position to discern this important factor I discussed and cling to it to beat the earthquake. of the world.

Some excerpts from the ebook “The Disappearance of Rituals” by South Korean thinker Byung-Chul Han allowed me to determine the highly effective instructional drive that, as a group, we’ve got managed to protect what we name “the college”. “. In the present day, the completely different instructional fashions have taken a again seat to convey and spotlight the one worth that has at all times been current, though hidden: the ritual character of the college group.

It’s the rituals, Han tells us, that form the transitions of phases of life, opening magical thresholds that take us to unknown locations (from childhood to youth, from youth to maturity, and so forth.). Likewise, it appears to me, the college ritual permits college students and, to a big extent their households, to order what occurs in on a regular basis life and create a story about it, with out which the times would change into the identical. and time would cross with out our realizing it. . Fortunate for us we’ve got the category schedules, the completely different topics, the recess, the ceremonies, the celebration of the festivities, the weekends, the vacations, the examination seasons and the stress to cross them, so we undergo the yr and we transfer to the following stage: the “Magic of the Thresholds” by which human beings, by magic, in impact, change into completely different. The college yr ends. Every single day the youngsters are getting older; some change into adolescents; others get severe as a result of they know they’ve began to arrange for maturity. Some enter via the tutorial door of a occupation. In the meantime, like a military of vigilantes, the academics accompany the scholars and see them undergo the varied exit doorways when the time comes.

Greater than the business features or mere inertia, it was the ritualistic nature, in my view, that enabled the college to climate the storm. Above the precise methods that every establishment has applied is the reminiscence of these legendary scenes by which one of many elders of the tribe gathers youngsters and younger folks round a bonfire to inform them the story. of previous generations, infecting (or relatively immunizing) them with the story of the vicissitudes and exploits which have allowed their group to outlive the centuries. Our ritual is supported by easy and deep issues: attending courses, sitting with different classmates, warming as much as the flame of the widespread purpose (even when barely lukewarm within the early morning), and staying alert. and “current” to pay attention and ask the instructor questions.

Eroded by worry, the world group at the moment has the chance to fix its contours by merely repeating what human beings have solid from their origins. Round this bonfire that’s “faculty” (even digital and disjointed), youngsters and younger college students meet day-after-day to protect, even in such tough situations, one of many axes of our world (on the picture of a tribe that by no means stops stoking its ritual hearth in a state of affairs of absolute poverty, with uncommon branches, within the chilly and the wind).

Rituals, Byung-Chul Han reminds us, permit us to understand what lasts, liberating us from contingency. Curiously, we are able to apply this phrase he makes use of in a philosophical sense to the pandemic (the contingent is the unintentional, the incidental). It’s true: with all its tragedy, it’s nonetheless an ephemeral factor within the face of the important and the everlasting that rituals permit us to protect. Amongst them, the college ritual occupies a preeminent place.