Marina Garcés and Guillem Sala in Conversation

Education presently occupies a prominent place in public debate. Old methodologies have been condemned as obsolete and new models compete over which will best allow us to adapt to a changing and, above all, uncertain world. Yet, the discussion about form often sidelines the question of the ultimate aim of education: why do we learn? How and in what sense do we learn? The philosopher Marina Garcés has profoundly explored all these questions in her latest book Escola d’aprenents (School of Learners, Galàxia Gutenberg, 2020). Besides methods and models, education is approached here as the need to coexist with life’s disproportion, the distance between knowledge and ignorance. It is an emancipatory task involving both teachers and learners which, at the end of the day, should allow us to imagine, from our present, the best possible future.

In this session, Marina Garcés will speak with the sociologist and writer Guillem Sala, author of El càstig (The Punishment, L’Altra Editorial, 2020), a work of fiction which is also about the world of education. The session will be presented and moderated by Jordi Solé Blanch who, with a PhD in Education, teaches Social Education at the Open University of Catalonia.