Kindness, evil, and teaching.

We want them strong like oaks; efficient, effective, safe, responsible. That's good. We should ask ourselves if we also want them to be human. Human in the sense of goodness.

Goodness has a bad reputation in our pragmatic world, even so it is the core of our species. As far as we move away from goodness, we lose humanity.

We want them to be empathic. I want them to experience empathy, feelings, emotions, understanding, respect. I want them to be flexible, dialogues. I want them to exercise an enough degree of reasonable tolerance.

I wish it for them and for the society they will build.

And I wonder if I have to punish them with harshness and without exceptions when they do not give the teacher all that they were asked. If I do not punish them, I run the risk of not preparing enough for a society that does not forgive the mistakes about time and time required. Even so, this last idea is the trap of the system.

The harsh and inhuman hardness of the system feeds on pedagogy that teaches us to live in a rugged and inhumane system. When I teach a boy or girl that when she does not deliver her or his homework, she or he will be punished, then I’m not only teaching her or him to be strong in this system, I’m also teaching him or her to become a controlling agent of this inflexibility. And this infelxibility is perpetuated. If I act like this, I teach him to be strict, not to understand, not to listen, and to turn (for someone else) into the difficulty against which I am preparing him or her.

On the other hand, If I decide that when he or she arrives and tells me that he or she has some family problems, trouble-makings, may be hard for him to be explained, and that have caused him or her to forget to take the order … so, if in these circumstances I listen to him or to her, and I encourage him or her to open up and tell me the problem, and if then, once I’ve listened to her or to him, I understand him or her, and so grant himor her one more day to deliver the work... Will not I be teaching him to be more human? Will not I be building a system that will work in a more harmonious way with the respect that individuals deserve as persons they are? Will not I be gaining his or her heart and making it more receptive to later teachings? Will not I make him or her stronger to resist a system that wants him or her to turn into an insect of the swarm?

I have the answer. Let each one answer for him.