At 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, the loudspeakers of a train leaving Madrid announce that a film with “correct” content is going to be broadcast. Minutes later, somewhere between Alcalá de Henares and Guadalajara, the wagon's screens are filled with panda bears. They are humanized bears 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 A Panda in Trouble, the latest titles that the cinema has dedicated to this cute and goofy herbivore.
Of course, the content is suitable for everyone present. Above all, if one takes into account that there is not a single child in the wagon. At this time the children do not return from Madrid. Boys and girls, at eight in the afternoon on a weekday, leave after school, or have dinner, or do their homework at home or watch porn on their mobile phones locked in their room while their parents sleep on the AVE Madrid- Barcelona.
No passengers look at the screens on the train, but if they did, they wouldn't be offended. A panda bear seems to have made friends with a brown bear, rougher and more vicious than the first, but decent as the most. Almost at the same time, a piece of news stands out from the rest in the mobile Twitter app. A Florida school just fired the principal for displaying in class an image of Michelangelo's David, the 18-foot sculpture depicting the starkly nude biblical hero just before he clashes with Goliath.
A parent flew into a rage at what he considered a pornographic display and the school was ruthless and released the principal into the darkness of unemployment. This she, in statements to a local media, she admits that she had not warned the families of the type of content that was going to be shown those days in the classroom.
That is to say, the teacher herself assumes that Renaissance art (roughly speaking, the 15th and 16th centuries) is too liberal for the United States of today, a country that the new and emerging batch of Republicans would undoubtedly like 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 flashes of progress in feudal Europe. But that the school of one of the most advanced countries lives this involution does not stop being worrisome.
The tools of technological progress can also be reactionary, like the algorithm that chases nipples on the networks but encourages the circulation of hate messages. Or like that porn that promotes old macho attitudes and violence against women traveling through the new digital networks for the distribution of multimedia content.
The survival of the motivated, progressive and free teacher is threatened. Also in Europe, although it does not reach extremes like Florida, the irruption of new technologies and social networks has given unusual power to students 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) augurs a revolution in education of unimaginable proportions. And immediately.
It is no longer about 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 like in a viralizable video. The role of the teacher as a virtuous intermediary between knowledge and the student body is blurred, at the same time that such reactionary trollies slip through the motives of the kids that even flat-earthing seems like 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 well and a participatory citizenry like the one organized in Barcelona to confront the excesses of AI (see the exploded view) are part of the solution. Minimal, but essential part of the solution.
