In this unusual beginning of the new course, a lot of people have looked at school, worried about how it will be, about its characteristics, about whether it guarantees the health of children. It's amazing to me that some of you have not shown that concern anymore because, although this new coronavirus hasn't arrived, there's always been reason to worry about the influence that school can have on children, but well, without getting too much into it, it's a joy that everyone has started to think about the nature of the school. And that it has also been placed in relation to such a key question: How should the school be to make it safe and healthy for children?

If we want to answer this question seriously, the first thing we should do is reflect on our conception of health. What we call healthy or healthy. This issue is not at all superficial, but touches the core, the core of the problem. The direction of the changes this health crisis is demanding from the school cannot be decided except in terms of the dimension we give to the concept of health.

If we truly believe that health should be bio-psycho-affective beyond nice words, we will have to start paying attention also to the psycho-affective level of health, as it is a very unknown field for the emotional non-savers like us. To begin with, we must internalize that the basis of health at this level is in childhood and generalize in society the knowledge of what children need to develop it in a healthy psycho-affective way. We're skilled as guardians of children's physical health, but we fail over and over again in the task of caring and raising children emotionally, massively reproducing our dysfunctional patterns, or what's the same, spreading neurosis.

Yes, the current model of conventional education carried out through family and school institutions generates neurosis. Or in more severe cases, psychopathology. Because it's not designed to satisfy what boys and girls need, and because it's about avoiding the pain produced by the dissatisfied voids, precisely at the base of the characteristic neurotic configuration. As long as our society is the product of that particular educational model, we're all neurotic at one level or another. Neurotic functioning is so widespread among us that we're not aware of it. We've normalized neurosis, normalized dysfunction, normalized behaviors that move us away from health. So much so, that we've come to think that health is that.

I do not know whether the protocols that have been proposed for schools in this time of pandemic will serve to protect me from the virus or not, because I am not a doctor. But what I do know is that these are measures against the psycho-affective health of children that demonstrate tremendous insensitivity and lack of ethics regarding the conditions that the natural law of children would require.

The proposed measures are so far from the very nature of children that they can only be carried out by denying themselves. Fear and coercion have no choice but for an educator to achieve the hypothesized aseptic reality, to the detriment, of course, of the confidence that children have to develop in the world and of the fear they need to learn. Pedagogically, there is only the option of the master class, being forbidden movement and contact.

Let us fight for schools to ensure and enable health. But really. As Orwell said, keeping humanity is often a bigger challenge than surviving.