Utopia Public
The controversy over the reform of the law 30 highlights the importance of having ambitious frames of reference in the context of which can understand the secondary proposals. In my opinion, the discussion that is occurring do not touch the essence of the theme, which diverts attention to matters which, being sensitive, they conceal the essence of the problem.To begin with, higher education and University (capitalized) are not exactly the same. While higher education understood as a public service for the training of technicians, technologists and professionals oriented to economic productivity is evaluated according to parameters of coverage, efficiency and quality, the University, in its social function, it should be assessed according to the production capacity of science, technology and understanding of social and cultural phenomena of humanity. While one of the functions of the University is the training of professionals, not all institutions forming professionals can call universities.The University, in the context of the history of culture, is a space for the utopia. For her it traverses the great adventure of modernity and in their cloisters large discussions on philosophy, economics, politics and law have been forged. The Nobel prizes in science have matured in the research groups of these centres of knowledge, are reservoirs of memory and agitators of the discontent that drives innovation and the search for new human horizons. At large universities, conceived as an essential public good for civilization, are housed libraries, museums, schools of art, orchestras, Olympic athletes and an intellectual elite without age limit.The question, then, is if the country deserves to wear out discussing if any private developer interested in exit to sell education to the poor, because the rich already have it in abundance and of very good quality (in Colombia and abroad), or if a serious reform must begin with the need that we have at least three or four universities of truth, in which the State and individuals are willing to invest in the future in the long term to the national culture.
This is a discussion that cannot give the technocrats and administrators of precarious short term budgets.The proposal of the Government is short-sighted and petty. It does not contain a single ambitious idea. You are outside issues that matter to a country that has to survive in the knowledge society. It does not address the public University as the only possible social articulation of space, and that route private centres will assume to the rich, and the officers, to the poor, which will deepen the social distances. So that a society is equitable, not enough desk there for everyone: must have desk for many in the same place, in the same class, with the same teacher. That means that there must be truth colleges, large, with capacity to accommodate greater diversity around knowledge, to science, to culture.If the proposal of the Government is poor, the reaction of activists is very poor: how to defend the University if those who assume the? spokesperson of the students were encapuchan and change the word and knowledge by stone and gunpowder?, do I tell it is public when his space has become a closed by walls ghetto?, how can mature public knowledge, culture and universality in spaces closed by railings, as if they were private enclaves?There is still a slight hope that, from the induced chaos, serious Academy representatives to draw a rabbit hat and begin to discuss what is urgent to discuss.
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