Breathe
By Anonymous.
Uncertainty has many faces. Sometimes it presents itself as spectator silence, sometimes as a series of accelerated questions, and among others, it can also come as euphoric dissociation. Those are the children. Adults, however, have other styles.
Running a school in times of uncertainty and increased insecurity has been a difficult experience for myself to describe, especially since it is not over. While everything in life is strategy, the variables of these times have been relatively new. The protocol in case of a shooting is a surreal composition that speaks of preserving life, creating the idea of a control that we don't really have.
On the other hand, there is a silent consensus that learning is expected to share the same relevance as survival. Schools "cannot stop teaching", even when we are not clear about the conditions for doing so.
There are no educational theories that speak of cognitive development starting from a compromised nervous system. It has always been my perception, or rather my family's school, that Latin America is a rich but peculiar land. We have spent decades of silent invasions, without national projects, and submerged in a panorama whose narrative always seems dismembered, outside of us. As if introspection demanded everything from ourselves, or even as if we knew the answer beforehand, that none of this belongs to us, not even life itself.
We are somehow used to living in a state of alertness, where we are so aware of death that we celebrate life so much. We are not serene people. Our ancestral wisdom has become a journey of cultural exploration rather than the doctrine by which we guide our lives and the community we share. And that is our heritage. Children on alert, children ready to normalize a position of defense, children prepared to process sadness, frustration, fear and uncertainty in a practical and effective way. That's how we settle things in and move on. That's been the name of the game, and it's something that I personally find impossible to judge.
The balance of an educational community depends on the synergy of all those who make it up. Administrators, parents, students, teachers and collaborators, we all struggle daily against the oversaturation of a system alien to the human experience, with the lenses through which we perceive and make sense of the world, and we present ourselves to make up this community, trying to add up for a common goal, to contain and guide children who will invariably face the same system.
This situation, quite foreign to the needs of an educational community, has added an element that seems to pull every member in unforeseen directions. The state's economy becomes an unstable basis for managing the enterprise, parents are forced to rethink the price to pay to ensure the well-being of their families, students navigate the context as best they can, without sorting out whether the material we adults have given them is sufficient, and teachers and collaborators split their lives between responsibility and their own well-being.
During the Covid pandemic, an interesting concept emerged: essential personnel. What is an essential employee? What are really those activities and tasks that are essential to the preservation of human life? My dad has always told me, we all have the ability to normalize everything, as long as you have the ability to fit it in your head in a way that doesn't disturb you. And so I think it happens with these questions of extreme subjectivity, the ways are infinite.
Beyond a punctual list of administrative or pedagogical strategies in compromising times, the most significant contribution I could have shared in this text is my honesty. I share these words from the security of my leadership and in full responsibility for the work that my employees and I perform with vocation every day. We know nothing. We only have the power to continue to strengthen the tools that allow us to pause, to observe what is there, to perceive each other in our realities, to have compassion for ourselves, to have wisdom to understand our history, and the temperance to remain in connection with the only thing that sustains us, the natural, the divine, what we all seek in one way or another, to be well.
Anonymous.
General Director of Private Schools.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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