Nuccio Ordine, Italian philosopher, scholar, disseminator and lawyer of knowledge as the essence of modern society, is the winner of the Princess of Asturias Award for Humanities and Communication, which was awarded this morning in Oviedo. His choice reflects the weight, sometimes distressing, that education has taken on in the current public debate.
Ordine's approach, author of five essays translated into Spanish and professor at Calabria, Harvard, Paris, and Berlin, can be synthesized in The Utility of the Useless (Cliff, 2013), an unexpected best seller that fixed many of the ideas about the education that are confronted today in Europe. That book had the subtitle "manifesto" and in the prologue he placed himself in the context of the crisis of the period 2008-2013, the years of austerity and panic among the middle classes.
In The Uselessness of the Useless, Ordine responded to that utilitarian survival ethos of the worst years of the crisis with a vindication of knowledge as the only way to make human experience dignified. In part, The Uselessness of the Useless was another way of saying Outrage, as Stéphane Hessel's book claimed, but with more intellectual than emotional content.
The utility of the useless also served to define the paradoxes of the education debate, in which many apparently progressive measures had an effect opposite to that intended: lax academic requirements, Ordine said, led to the chronification of poverty because it prevented that the children of the working class ascend socially through work and education. The empire of happiness at school led to the frustration of millions of immature and apathetic citizens. The abandonment of classical disciplines led a society of docile and resigned consumers to a new proletarianization. Ordine spoke from the progressive vocabulary to refute the direction that the left had taken in education, his favorite field throughout history.
"In Italy and throughout the world there is this idea that knowledge is not useful by itself and is only valid if you can do something with it. But, to know how to do it, you first have to know. The master class is thought to be obsolete that, since Socrates, has circulated culture and knowledge. It seems silly to me. Every year I read to my students a wonderful letter that Albert Camus wrote to his primary school teacher in Algiers on the day in 1957 that he won the Nobel Prize I told him: "Without you, without your hand as a guide, a poor child like me would not have made it. Camus thinks of his teacher the day he is awarded the Nobel Prize! We all remember a teacher who has instilled in us the passion for History, Literature or Mathematics", said Ordine in an interview published in EL MUNDO last year.
His personal story is very close to that of the anecdote of Camus and his teacher. Ordine was born in a very small town in Calabria where there was no school but there was a teacher that she attended in her house. When she was finally able to enter a classroom, that experience was almost an epiphany. Education, in her house, was not taken for granted but had the value of a conquest.
Ordine is not just a generalist. The Italian philosopher has studied in his books issues such as the representation of power in the Middle Ages (Three crowns for a king), about Giordano Bruno, about the birth of the novel in the 16th century, about philosophy and diplomacy in the modern... His investigations often have the detective air of the books of Umberto Eco. Eco, who won the same Princess of Asturias Award for Humanities and Communication in 2000.
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