Sometimes readers are interested in something that we journalistically take for granted, for granted. Those recurring debate topics that we only return to when there is news.
This week, for example, this case has been that of the massive teachers’ strike in South Korea. The country with one of the strictest school disciplines on the planet and which is super top in PISA has its teachers on the verge of a nervous breakdown – not to mention suicide – because the government has lowered their authority in the classroom. Like in that ad for the cotton test, correcting and scolding children is going to end. And this is how the parents –yes, the parents– have climbed on the beards of the teachers because you will see who is in charge here.
Hannah Arendt considered it a social, political and ethical catastrophe to lose or distort authority, understood as that which is exercised through the respect it arouses. Let’s not confuse it with authoritarianism, which is precisely the denial of it. We look towards Korea, which is more than 10,000 kilometers away, when the loss of authority is at home, right under our noses.
We bring this topic to this corner of the newspaper at the invitation of a reader whom I do not have the pleasure of meeting but I do have the pleasure of thanking him for his loyalty. Josep Varela is called. “Who is speaking of authority today?” he asks me via email as he describes “tyrannical children”, desperate teachers and “silly young parents (babaus, in Catalan) who educate their children with stupid complacency”.
Accurate shots, those of this reader.
Indeed. The culture of permissiveness is invisible. Like a sunken mountain range, to which we have only seen the crests. Fathers or mothers who go as colleagues, in fact, are leaving their child an orphan. He wants things here and now, and we run with the net below. We give them everything they ask for. He is not yes. There are no orders, no directions, no scolding. We do it all. We have engraved on fire that they cannot be frustrated.
Dear Josep Varela, you are more right than a saint. We are not doing well. And if that, another day we discuss the political discourse.
