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s and common place To say that the times we live are complex and with numerous discouraging features. Generalized violence, especially in the national and regional environment, the increasingly steep social and economic inequalities and the climate change crisis, which stands out as the main global challenge insufficiently faced; All these dynamics appear as obvious consequences of a civilizational model that has failed to ensure the dignity of life for most people. Given these world conditions, it is urgent to imagine and open step to other future configurations that correct the state of affairs and claim the right and the possibility of all people, without exception, to live with dignity.
Historically, education has been a space that society expects answers and alternatives in times of crisis. However, in recent times education and its institutions have been subject to various parts of the world and from various fronts of a delegitimization that questions its ability to continue being one of the most powerful tools to achieve the integral development of society.
It is true that in the last decades the educational space has been pushed to align its efforts in a preponderant way to the attention of the needs of the market, with the consequent weakening of the critical, creative and innovative vocation that has characterized the best moments of education in history, which depends its ability to draw horizons of the future and prepare people to encourage change processes beyond the classroom.
A little less than 500 years ago, within the Society of Jesus and in a critical era, the Jesuit educational project conceived as a key piece arose to fulfill the universal mission of concretizing the hope of a fair, fraternal and worthy life for all. An integral formation model in which the end of efforts is not knowledge in and by itself, but as a good that has to be at the service of a suffering reality, of the specific people and especially to whom Pope Francis called, the discarded of the world.
In such a way that the value of Jesuit education is not exhausted in its long tradition of almost half a millennium of history, but of the novelty that has been able to contribute to the world at all times and today, in its ability to stay at the forefront and the height of the challenges of each moment. It is an educational avant -garde that is sustained not only by the academic excellence characteristic of this educational model, but by the permanent dialogue of such intellectual excellence with the deepest and most structural needs of humanity, which requires the constant exercise of discernment and a permanent exit to the encounter with reality, especially that of the impoverished, oppressed and excluded majority.
The experience of meeting with reality and others constitutes the founding nucleus of Jesuit education, a nucleus that configures and gives meaning to educational contents and that puts the noble educational task as a key moment of a major process: the mission and the duty to build justice, fraternity and dignity in times and places where injustice, uncertainty and desolation predominates. Education will never lose meaning to the extent that the encounter, understanding and compassion with the pain of the world have as a starting point. The experience of contact with the suffering reality gives Jesuit education an unequivocal ethical compass from which intellectual rigor makes sense, and whose relevance and validity find their verification space in reality itself and in its transformation.
Thus, the Jesuit educational model and the Ignatian pedagogy continue to offer society an educational option that seeks to respond to the times we already live their challenges. Its recognized academic excellence, understood as social relevance, forms citizens and conscious, competent, compassionate and committed professionals, willing to the service of reality and capable of building hope in the borders and social margins. Only in this way is it understood that innumerable graduates of Jesuit schools and universities in the world are distinguished by their professional practice dedicated to social incidence and innovation in the most diverse socio -professional spaces with the common seal of the search for truth and justice and at the service of people’s dignity.
In a world in which immediateism, individual well -being, maximization of profits and consumption as a path of happiness, educational and avant -garde tradition characteristic of the Society of Jesus is promoted a different way of conceiving and living in community: as a single body called to fraternity, compassion and co -responsibility, as agents of change capable of preaching hope, not as a voluntary discourse without Material foundations, but as a critical, creative and liberating practice that allows to open space to other futures and other fuller realities. The search for excellence, social relevance and permanent commitment to the integral accompaniment of both the educator and the student, make Jesuit education a true hopeful news, especially in nebular times as the current ones.
In tune with the feast of San Ignacio de Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, and within the framework of the sixth report of activities and taking possession of the new Rectorate of the Ibero Puebla, this column serves as a claim of an educational model that has managed to stay at the forefront of education for almost 500 years. Thanks to the community of Ibero Puebla for being testimony of the need and feasibility of building hope, dignity and justice from education.
