It seems urgent to prepare people to take up jobs. However, remains that Ortega question about if the urgent concern is not doing us to lose the passion for what is important. If school is to teach to do tasks such as managing the computer or know traffic signs, or whether to include in the curriculum subjects of Humanities, prepare to have a sense of history, mastery of the language, ability to criticize, to reflect and to argue. That they are not powers to perform an occupation, but the character capabilities to direct their own lives. On the other hand, insists that the whole of education is directed to form good citizens, and this is not any occupation, but a dimension of the person, that which allows you to drive with justice in a community. Not so much live in tranquility, which can be to las trancas, cemeteries or the silenced, but live from justice as indispensable value. And for that you do not learn how to deal with common life from knowledge of shared history, tasting of the tongue, the exercise of criticism, reflection, the art of appropriating itself to pursue life, the ability to appreciate the best values.
Things that do not belong to the mastery of the competencies, but to the formation of character. It is not good news that wants to reduce the philosophy in high school, nor is it that is intended to circumvent the civic ethic or that education for citizenship which should help educate in justice, not only to memorize lists of rights, constitutions and statutes of autonomy. Just limiting school and University to prepare for urgent, not important, to carry out tasks and not to take personal and shared life with guts for. Adela Cortina Professor of ethics and political philosophy from the University of Valencia original author and source of the article.