At 8 p.m. on Thursday, the loudspeakers of a train leaving Madrid announced that a film with “correct” content would be broadcast. Minutes later, somewhere between Alcalá de Henares and Guadalajara, the wagon’s screens were filled with panda bones. They are humanized bones that say some things that make sense and others that are absurd, just like humans. I see it started, so I’ll never know if it was Kung Fu Panda , Kung Fu Panda 2 , Kung Fu Panda 3 , or Panda in Trouble , the last titles that cinema has devoted to this cute and silly herbivore.
Of course, the content is suitable for everyone present. Especially, if you consider that there was not a single child in the wagon. At this time the children do not return from Madrid. Boys and girls, at eight o’clock in the evening on a weekday, leave extra-curricular activities, eat dinner, do their homework or watch porn on their mobile phones locked in their room while their parents sleep on the AVE Madrid- Barcelona
No passenger looks at the screens on the train, but if they did, I wouldn’t be offended. A panda bear seems to have befriended a brown bear, more robust and knowledgeable than the first, but very, very decent. Almost at the same time, one news item stands out above the rest in the mobile Twitter app. A school in Florida has just fired the principal for showing the class an image of Michelangelo’s David, the 5.17-meter sculpture that depicts the biblical hero completely naked just before confronting Goliath. A parent became enraged because of what he considered a pornographic display and the school had no contemplations and sent the headmistress into the darkness of unemployment. She, in statements to a local media, admitted that she had not warned the families of the type of content that would be shown in the classroom that day.
In other words, the teacher herself assumes that Renaissance art (grosso modo, 15th and 16th centuries) is too liberal for today’s USA, a country that the new and emerging republicans would undoubtedly like to see a little more medieval .
It is obvious that history is not a succession of neat periods and that, of course, there are traces of the Middle Ages in the societies of 2023 just as there were oases of progress in feudal Europe. But the fact that a school in one of the most advanced countries is going through this evolution is still worrying. The tools of technological progress can also be reactionary, like the algorithm that hunts nipples on the networks but encourages the circulation of hate messages. Or like this porn that promotes old sexist attitudes and violence against women traveling through the new digital networks of multimedia content distribution.
The survival of the motivated, progressive and free teacher is threatened. Also in Europe, even if it does not reach extremes like that of Florida, the emergence of new technologies and social networks has given students great power and may end up turning the school into a marginal screen of the metaverse. The imminent popularization of search engines powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) portends an education revolution of unimaginable proportions. And we have to touch it.
It is no longer a matter of seeing or not seeing David’s genitals. It is now possible to virtually undress your favorite actress or classmate and make her say whatever you want in a viral video. The role of the teacher as a virtuous mediator between knowledge and students is blurred, while lies are so reactionary that even terraplanism seems to be a nice half-truth next to it.
Teachers willing to sacrifice themselves, parents who know how to put themselves in the shoes of their children’s teachers, governments that rescue the humanities from the pit and a participatory citizenry like the one in Barcelona that has been organized to deal with the excesses of AI (see box) are part of the solution. Minimal, but essential part of the solution.
