Teachers
(Spanish version here) A teacher walks through the knowledge of many sciences and theories without accepting one in particular; His role Is not to defend scientific positions, but to expand their diffusion and to question their postulates, evidencing the deficiencies of theories. A teacher shows his students the way to understand knowledge, to research, sowing in them the interest in study, so that they learn to evaluate and improve, to experiment with them and to document their discoveries with scientific rigor. A teacher should not assume the defence of a particular position, but must commit to disseminate any of the arguments so that the student decides what his position will be; In particular, the teacher should show students the method to discover new knowledge and to question, doubt and test their premises, inviting his students not to be satisfied with incomplete results, with half-truths.
English translation by Joe Barcala, With the help of Jesús García Barcala
Teaching values
The teacher lives and teaches values, but does not impose them. His main interest is in continuous learning, because he loves knowledge, he makes incursions day by day into new challenges and thus infects his students. Always invents new strategies so that the student is interested and takes scientific positions at any level. Therefore, he is secular; Can not and should not assume specific moral values in the classroom. It would be like being in favor or against Christopher Columbus. The teacher rather watches over history and humanity from a much higher point of view, avoiding cultural biases or boundaries. He can not opt for Mohammed or Christianity, for it recognizes its origins and the present confrontations. And he may have children sitting at the desks at the same time; He puts interest in knowing history, to value its postulates, to recognize its influences on the world’s geography; It will be the student who decides his interest in one of them or assumes a more futuristic, sociological or cultural human vision.
Teachers does not defend a political party either; He understands that ideologies converge and diverge at different times. Nor is he a supporter of extremism of the left or right, of imperialism or nationalism. He teaches his students to evaluate the pros and cons of the positions of each political institute and guides them in their research to question the influence of each one, to doubt their fallacies and to recognize their successes.
Research
For all the above reasons, the teacher should not assign tasks but guide the interest of the students that he generates; The task is imposed by the pupil himself, satisfying the curiosity that the teacher causes daily. Research should not be tasks, but formulas to find the truth, the constant becoming of a student whose interest increases as he advances in his ideals of life. Curricula in this regard are nothing more than mere references that guide new teachers in the pupils’ learning map and not a narrow box of methodical regulation. What does a teacher learn? Double and for each student. He follows the steps of each one’s research as well as understand the part of the process in which they find themselves and the very personal way to face the truths and to cross each one’s investigation routes. The teacher, in short, should be the most important person in human communities and not the degrading bureaucratic people who they have become in many cases.