By Fernando - The antithesis of love: a manifesto on educating to recognize people as people

Human beings are not born ready. We are made in encounters. And perhaps that is where the essence of education lies: in the possibility of becoming, together, what we are not yet. It is not about training professionals or teaching isolated content. It is about training humans—and that, today, is a radical act.

We live in times of exhaustion. The logic of performance has hijacked us. Fatigue has become currency, productivity has become a metric of value, and education has been dragged into this whirlwind. We teach to compete, to accumulate, to win. But win what? And against whom? Love—that biological, ancestral, and essential component of life—has been reduced to weakness. And without love, education is impossible.

Educating is an act of love because it requires recognizing the other as a subject. As someone like me. As a person. And it is from this recognition that we build language, culture, knowledge. Science education, when alive, when freed from technical functionalism, is the key to understanding the world and life in a profound, sensitive, and integrated way. It is the path for each person to understand their existence not as a given, but as a collective, biological, social, and historical construction.

But today, everything seems to operate in the antithesis of love. Education has become a service. Bodies are molded to fit into gears that we did not build. Schools, universities, and institutions have been captured by a logic of efficiency that erases the individual. Science distances itself from life, and life becomes empty of meaning.

Against this, education needs to return to being a space for dreams. A space for the formation of beings who feel, think, act, contradict themselves, and learn from others. Human formation involves recovering the time for conversation, listening, care, and encounter. It involves restoring knowledge to its role as a tool for freedom, not a weapon for competition.

Science education can be all of this. It can help to form autonomous beings who understand living systems because they are part of them. Who understand the complexity of the world without surrendering to the simplicity of ready-made diagnoses. Who recognize themselves in the diversity of others.

This is the education I want. Not one that trains machines, but one that helps train people. People with the courage to feel. People with the courage to be. Because in the end, that is what being human is: being in relationship. And educating, today, is our greatest act of resistance against the barbarism of isolation.

By Fernando Puertas - @fhpuertas