But how would you establish that system of street teachers that in any book we have seen mentions, and you advise in one of the numbers of Americalast year I have in sight? “
—This is useful to ask ourselves an enthusiastic gentleman of Santo Domingo.
We will tell you shortly that the thing matters, and not the way it is done.
There is a cluster of essential truths that fit in the wing of a hummingbird, and are, however, the key to public peace, spiritual elevation and the great country.
It is necessary to keep men in the knowledge of the earth and in that of the endurability and transcendence of life.
Men must live in the peaceful, natural and inevitable enjoyment of freedom, as they live in the enjoyment of air and light.
They are condemned to die a people in which the fondness of wealth and knowledge of the sweetness, need and pleasures of life do not develop equally.
Men need to know the composition, fertilization, transformations and applications of the material elements of whose tillage comes the healthy arrogance of the one who works directly in nature, the vigor of the body that results from contact with the forces of the earth, and the honest and safe fortune that produces its cultivation.
Men need who often moves compassion in their chest, and tears in their eyes, and does them the supreme good of feeling generous: that by wonderful compensation of nature, the one that occurs, grows; And he who replicates himself, and lives with small enjoyments, and fears to leave them with others, and only grew up in benefiting his appetites, he becomes a man in solitude, and carries in his chest all the gray hair of winter, and becomes inside, already seem on the outside, – instead.
Men grow, they grow physically, in a visible way they grow, when they learn something, when they come to possess something, and when they have done some good.
Only fools talk about misfortunes, or selfish. Happiness exists on earth; And it is conquered with the prudent exercise of reason, the knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and the constant practice of generosity. He who looks for it elsewhere will not find it: that after having liked all the glasses of life, only in those is flavor. —It is legend of lands of Latin America that at the bottom of the ancient cups a Christ was painted, so when they hurry one, they say: “Until you see you, my Christ!” Well, at the bottom of those glasses a serene, fragrant, endless, overwhelming cycle opens!
Being good is the only way to be happy.
Being a cult is the only way of being free.
But, in common of human nature, you need to be prosperous to be good.
And the only way open to constant and easy prosperity is to know, cultivate and take advantage of the inexhaustible and indefatigable elements of nature. Nature is not jealous, like men. He has no hatred, or fear like men. It does not close the step to anyone, because it does not fear anyone. Men will always need the products of nature. And as in each region only certain products are given, its active change will always be maintained, which assures all peoples comfort and wealth.
There is, then, to undertake Cruzada to reconquer the Holy Sepulcher. Jesus did not die in Palestine, but is alive in every man. Most of the men have fallen asleep on earth. They ate and drank; But they didn’t know about themselves. The Crusade has now to undertake to reveal their own nature to men, and to give them, with the knowledge of flat and practice science, personal independence that strengthens goodness and encourages the decorum and pride of being a kind creature and living thing in the great universe.
That is, then, what teachers have to take by the fields. Not only agricultural explanations and mechanical instruments; but tenderness, which is so lacking and so much to men.
The peasant cannot leave his job to go to Miles to see incomprehensible geometric figures, and learn the ends and rivers of the Africa Peninsulas, and provide empty didactic terms. The sons of the peasants cannot depart full leagues days after days of the paternal stay to learn Latin declines and abbreviated divisions. And the peasants, however, are the best national mass, and the healthiest and most juicy, because Receive closely and fully the effluviums and the kind correspondence of the Earth, in whose treatment they live. Cities are the minds of nations; But his heart, where he gifs, and where the blood is distributed, he is in the fields. Men are still eating machines, and relicing concerns. It is necessary to make each man a torch.
Well, nothing less proposes that new religion and new priests! Nothing less is painting than the missions with which the new time will soon begin to spread! The world is change; And purple and chasules, necessary in the mystical times of man, are lying on the bed of agony. Religion has not disappeared, but has been transformed. Above the grief in which the study of details and slowly wrapping human history adds to observers, it is seen that men grow up, and that they already have half of the Jacob scale: what beautiful poems does the Bible have! If curled up at a summit, their eyes are suddenly taken over human march, it will be seen that both peoples were never loved and loved now, and that despite the painful disrup expansion impetus that now abrases all men. They have stood up, as friends who knew each other, and wanted to meet; And they all march to a happy encounter.
We walk on the waves, and bounce and roll with them; So we do not see, nor stunned from the coup we stop to examine, the forces that move them. But when this sea is serene, you can ensure that the stars will be closer to the earth. The man will at last in the sun his battle sword!
What is said is what we would put as a soul of the street teachers. What a joy of the peasants, when they saw, of time in time, to the good man who teaches them what they do not know, and with the effusions of an expansive treatment they leave in the spirit the stillness and elevation that always remain of seeing a loving and healthy man! Instead of young and crops, we would be discussed from time to time, until finally we were always talking about, what the teacher taught, of the curious machine that he brought, in the simple way to cultivate the plant that they with so much work had been exploiting, of the big and good thing that he is the teacher, and when he will come, that he already hurried them, to ask him what with that incessant enlargement of the mind, they Know something! With what joy they would not all go to guide leaving shovels and hoes, to the tent, full of curiosities, of the teacher!
Dilated courses, of course they could not be done; But yes, well studied by the propagators, germs ideas could be spread and impregnated. The appetite of knowledge could be opened. The impetus would be given.
And this would be a sweet invasion, according to what the human soul is bass and interested; Because as the teacher would teach them gently and beneficial things, they would be for their own pleasure without effort infiltrating a science that begins by flattering and serving their interest; —What who tries to improve the man has not to dispense with his bad passions, but to tell them as a very important factor, and see not to act against them, but with them.
We would not send pedagogues for the fields, but conversationalists. Dómines would not send, but educated people who were answering the doubts that the ignorant presented them or the questions they had prepared for when they came, and observing where cultivation errors were made or exploitable wealth were unknown, so that they revealed them and demonstrate those, with the remedy at the bottom of the demonstration.
In sum, it is necessary to open a tenderness and science campaign, and create for it a body, which does not exist, of missionary teachers.
The street school is the only one that can remedy peasant ignorance.
And in fields as in cities, it is urgent to replace the indirect and sterile knowledge of books, the direct and fruitful knowledge of nature.
It is urgent to open normal schools of practical teachers, to then water them by valleys, mountains and corners, as the Amazon Indians tell that to create men and women, watered throughout the earth the seeds of La Palma Moriche Father Amalivaca!
The time is lost in literary elementary education, and peoples of pernicious and empty vacuum cleaners are created. The sun is no more necessary than the establishment of scientific elementary education.
