I appreciate everything they taught me at the public institute I attended. In the second year of BUP, Marina taught us the mysteries of the natural logarithm and made us solve derivatives and integrals. Let’s not mythologize either: I derived, I integrated, but I don’t understand the meaning of such operations. However, I know that 31 is less than 35 and that there are debates in which we neither enter nor leave, because they are not debates: they are certainties. If not, turn off and let’s go. Perhaps the epistemological sensitivity of the president of the Castilian-Leonese Cortes, Carlos Pollán, is so exacerbated that we are not sufficiently educated – educated as well – to understand that a shortlist of jurists is approved by a simple majority in which 31 is worth more than 35. Maybe the vote is quality. The news is not fresh, but it obsesses me and underlines the need to educate. You will say that I tortiously confuse the verbs educate y teachbut the initiative is not mine, but rather Díaz Ayuso’s when looking for reasons to plunge the Complutense University into poverty. Marina, come back. Two and two, four, and thank goodness Count Draco from Sesame Street counted everything—candles, musical notes…—to teach us arithmetic.
I am also grateful for everything they taught me in the Philology Faculty between 1984 and 1989. It is true that we revolted against a professor who called his students “bunnies” while we recited the fifth declension, but I insist that, by terrifyingly reducing the budget of At the Madrid public university, Ayuso does not think about the heteropatriarchy-roller, but rather the opposite. I am grateful that they taught me the absolute ablative, the Arthurian cycle, the medieval songbooks, While of rose and lilyMaría de Zayas, Rosalía de Castro… I appreciate the lessons—even the bad ones—because, without them, now I would not understand why certain attitudes hurt me and I would watch the advertisements without realizing that these are the ones that truly teach. For example, those of the banking entities that merge – in my review of 2024, these images also obsess me. And look, I like advertisements, their rhythm, wit and use of rhetorical figures: given my date of birth, I am postmodern despite myself. But, thanks to the training received at the public university, something smells rotten to me in Denmark when BBVA launches an advertising campaign aimed at Banco Sabadell shareholders to convince them of the benefits of its takeover bid, naturalizing hostile takeover bids and the competitiveness of the big fish. that eats the boy and those things that were frowned upon even in Mary Poppins. How normal everything is. How democratic. In a impoverished university that is mine, they taught me that where are they recreated by Jorge Manrique in the Couplets for the death of his father: “What did King Don Juan do? / The Infantes of Aragon / What did they do?” A few weeks ago, in a subway entrance, a man who begs for alms and is losing his mind—or not—updated the Latin cliché: “What happened to Emilio Botín? What was it?” he recited post-apocalyptically.
Let’s save the public university; let’s rescue The red book of school in the face of the Formation of the national spirit, because Extremadurans do not touch each other: there are Extremadurans who are democrats and Extremadurans who never were because democracy is a matter of procedure, but also of values whose red line is located in respect for human rights, in the rule that 31 is less than 35 and in the conviction that this certainty does not imply that profitability is a criterion to establish education.