The revenge of reality or the Montecristo syndrome

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Xavier Massó

Ortega said, I think in ‘The Revolt of the Masses’, that if we persist in ignoring reality, it ends up taking revenge. We could add that if such ignorance is deliberate, either by a will to ignore or by being subject to other types of imperatives, then we would be talking about wilful, culpable ignorance.

It is then useless appealing to the immorality of revenge, because the order of morality is human, and although human action transforms and moulds reality in its effects, it does not enter into the domain of morality. In other words, reality does not take revenge, this is just a human way of saying it; it is the effects of our actions on it that affect us. Let’s point it right, falling off a cliff is not immoral, it is simply the force of gravity; pushing someone to fall off a cliff is. Reality does not make mistakes or errors, we make mistakes and commit them when we act on it, and who bear the consequences.

The naturalistic fallacy – thinking that what has always been like this is because it is how it should be – is just as damaging in this sense as the idealistic fallacy – understanding that our ideas about reality correspond to its “posibilitas”. No, the theory of adequatio by old Aristotle does not go that way; quite the opposite. Educational policies have been incurring in the idealistic fallacy for decades, whose repeated failures do nothing but paradoxically reinforce the naturalistic fallacy. We continue to stubbornly believe that the moral height of ower intentions corresponds to the imperative of their effective materialization in reality. And so it happens that if our actions not only do not produce the desired effects, but even distance us further from them, either we take matters into our own hands, or we continue to persevere in the error.

We may think the less we teach, the more will be learned; or even that without teaching we will spontaneously learn in huge quantities and qualities. Or that school kills imagination, and turn then the whole course into a carnival and the days once reserved for this purpose into a simulation of what a school year once was. But every time we start, as humanly we cannot but do, from a given prior context and we do so in reasonable terms, there is nothing that allows us to consider such beliefs as valid general principles. If we still put them into practice and empty the curricula of content, leaving children and adolescents at the mercy of their impulses and volitions, the most certain thing is that some hundreds of generations later mankind may return to Atapuerca[1], but not precisely as tourists. If we detect that the levels are falling, the logical thing is to assume that we have been wrong and rectify, accept that our ideas were not viable and, with this conclusion, enrich in turn our knowledge of reality so that we make fewer mistakes next time.

We can also decide to banish exams from school, either because everyone has their own learning processes, or because they don’t prove anything. Or they require memorization and create anxiety, and we don’t want either of those for our students, in addition to it being unethical to evaluate their performance or to expect them to have a common background of standardized knowledge that is more or less valid for everyone. But if we then find ourselves at the doors of the Faculty of Medicine with people who are incapable of conceptually distinguishing a muscle from a bone, or, let’s put it in terms of competence based learning, that in order to know such a difference one must have had the personal experience of a bone fracture and a muscle contraction – you only learn what you experience, some say – the fault lies not with reality, nor with those affected by such ignorance, but with the stupid idea whose application made them ignonrant.

Or we can prohibit repeating and decree by law automatic promotion and graduation, but if later it turns out that the Pythagorean Theorem has to be explained to someone who has not even learned to add, the fault lies not with the automatically promoted ones, but with the madman who arranged their promotion and graduation to continue with a fiction that covers up the absurdity of his illusory educational ideas.

Likewise, we can consider, from the absolute conviction that human beings are good and kind by nature, the absolute abolition of authority and punishment, but if comes then that educational centers haver turned into Spaghetti Western towns dominated by 14 and 15 year old bullies, let us not blame reality either, but rather the fool who, ignorant of the human condition, of what it means to educate and endowed with a power that he should never have had, promoted such a situation by confusing his desires with reality; or the faker who’s taking advantage of such deceptiont.

We can also suspect that the very low academic performance is due to the socioeconomic situation and thus give up teaching the most vulnerable so as not to further strain their fragile life situation. And entertain them with trifles. Quite an empathetic act of emotional nobility. But if with this it turns out that we are depriving them of the only resource that could have allowed them to overcome their situation, then the self-fulfilling prophecy is not the fault of reality either, nor of them being poor, but of an educational model concocted by a predatory social engineering that has cynically abandoned them to their fate..

And we will continue to ignore reality without facing it or attributing their deterioration to imponderables of all kind and inventing tricks that predict the already imminent proximity of the pot of gold located under the rainbow that we’re supposed to have within our reach. Or blaming the victims for not being as they should have been. All the excuses, pretexts and alleged fatalities that we may imagine and claim. Anything goes, unless facing reality.

But they will only serve to keep going until the inexorable revenge of reality arrives. Although we may already be so doctrinally sedated that many will probabilly not even notice. Or they will blame reality for being evil, immoral… No way, reality is amoral, the immoral ones are all those who have concocted such an educational aberration. The damage has already been done, and what we are currently having with the terrible results in international reports, the shameless falsification of data on school failure and dropouts, and masses of people who have been schooled for more than ten years in a state of practical functional illiteracy, that is only the beginning.

Just like in ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ when a mysterious character whose origins no one knows arrives in Paris, living in the most luxuriant opulence, and some of the hitherto lucky high dignitaries begin to suffer adversities and misfortunes that they attribute to fate, until they discover, too late, that the novel had begun long before, and that their misfortunes were the effect of their past felonies, so forgotten that they no longer believed they still deserved punishment for them.

Perhaps our Mondego’s, Danglars’ and Villefort’s, with their ineffable Caderousses, they do not longer remember it either… It may be a good idea to refresh their memory.

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[1] Archaeological site in the rovince of Burgos (Spain), notable for its evidence of early human occupation dated about 800.000 years ago.

Source: educational EVIDENCE

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