Education Society and Culture

The mind map of the Colombian representation shows us a very particular reality that moves between the optimism and the pessimism and gives us the idea of an uncertain but still open future. We can see through the different articles that the importance of the education is a priority that concerns all the actors of society, from the worried mother who wants to give an appropriated education for her children to the ministers and governors who must provide the best efforts to improve the quality of education.

One of the most interesting sentences that can be found in this document is the one mentioned by Antanas Mokus ex-mayor of Bogota “La confianza en los profesores es una premisa básica” The confidence on teachers must be a premise. As we know the society is built around the family, but the families must trust in a group of professional who are in charge of the school process of their children. It is mandatory that we as society believe in the abilities of our teachers, and also we as teacher must give out biggest effort to make the school the place that the society desires. A great example of it can be the story of Natalia Patiño, a woman who became a teacher for choice.

But the optimistic features do not come only from teachers, but also from the people who rule the country, one of the articles that really surprised me was the one about the increasing of money in the public universities for the next year because it was one of the aspects that had been forgotten for the previous governments. Another aspect is the improvement in the level of use of English according to Education First EF, and that is the result of new politics in relative to the teaching of foreign languages that have been implemented in the last years. As it is mentioned in the Warton University article, Colombia’s reality is better than before but we are facing lots of new challenges. And the education has the key to face those challenges in a better way, but for it there must be a change like the one presented in the video “the forbidden Education” which is a masterpiece in education in the Latin-American modern times.

But as I mentioned at the beginning of this reflection, the perspectives are also pessimistic in some areas, maybe because the media sometimes emphasizes in the negative, or maybe because there are some truths that cannot be hidden, things like the poor use that most of our teens are giving to the internet, where they just want to play, surf, chat, and hang out online. Maybe that is not only a problem, maybe it is also an opportunity. I also found interesting the fact that most of the teachers complain on the same things that students do, but if we see it deeper, some of them are attitudes that the same educational system have instigated, and can be changed by a deep change in the way education is conceived.

But the culture and the society also bring their own diseases, one of them is the culture of the “easy way” like in the article that presents the people that they do not do either study or work, and that become scrubs of the society, as well as the ones who prefer to beg to the government for a subsidy or a governmental allowance instead of trying to find a job and earn their own money, and it is a phenomenon that has been increasing in the last years as it was mentioned.

So as I mentioned before the future is opened, but we need to understand our reality and our history to solve this puzzle that the reality proposes today.