I dream and I commit | By: Antonio Pérez Esclarín

By: Antonio Pérez Esclarín

To educate is to sow and cultivate the hope that it is possible to transform Venezuela and recover and deepen democracy. If we do not have hope and enthusiasm, we are dead as educators. Educating cannot merely be a means to earn a living, but it has to be a means to defend life, to give life, to provoke the desire to live authentically and with freedom. Therefore, it is impossible to educate without hope and no one can be an educator without a vocation for service. The true teacher assumes the exciting adventure, and today, painful and heroic due to the terrible salary and treatment he receives, of remaining faithful to the task of establishing a just and tolerant society.

Some time ago I read the story of a good priest who complained that many confessed to having had bad dreams, but no one confessed to the much more serious sin of not dreaming. All the great conquests of humanity began with the dream of someone or some, and the tenacious and courageous commitment to make it possible. For this reason, they were able to provoke enthusiasm, and mobilize the wills and lives of many, and the dream became a reality. Nothing important has ever been achieved without effort, without courage, without dedication. Therefore, educators are the “designers” of the new education that the new Venezuela will create. That is, we dream it and we design it with our effort and commitment.

Anatole France said that you never give as much as when you give hope, and that there is no worse thief than the one who steals dreams. In turn, Paulo Freire, the Father of Liberating Education, in his work “Pedagogy of Hope” insists that education requires the conviction that change is possible, it implies the militant hope that human beings can reinvent themselves. the world in an ethical and aesthetic direction different from today’s march. “I do not understand – Freire tells us – human existence and the necessary struggle to improve it without hope and dreams… Hopelessness immobilizes us and makes us succumb to fatalism in which it is not possible to gather the forces essential for the recreative attack of the world… It is not possible to fight if you do not have tomorrow, if you do not have hope… It is not possible to think about transforming the world without a dream, without a project. Dreams are projects that we fight for. Its achievement requires effort, courage, determination.”

Accepting the dream of a reconciled and prosperous Venezuela requires actively participating in its creation. Losing the ability to dream is losing the right to act as citizens, as authors and actors of the necessary changes at the political, economic, social, educational and cultural levels. Therefore, compared to the ““I think, therefore I am.” root of modernity; he ““I buy, therefore I am,” foundation of consumerist and hedonistic postmodernity; or the “I connect then I am” of liquid modernity, we must lift the “I dream and I commit, and that’s how I am” of active hope. I dream, we dream, and we commit with courage and enthusiasm to build our dreams of a just and free country.

But we need to educate hope, to overcome naivety and prevent it from slipping into hopelessness and despair. The fatalistic, immobilizing discourse, which renounces dreams and denies the historical vocation of human beings, is as negative as the merely voluntaristic and triumphalist discourse, which confuses change with the mere desire or proclamation of change.

We need, therefore, a critical hope, not a naive one, which requires tenacious and combative commitment, and great coherence between word and life. Consequently, to continue working with enthusiasm, without giving up or giving up, for a reconciled and prosperous Venezuela, where the defense of the Constitution and Human Rights show us the way and shape our actions.

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