I am not an educator. I am a journalist by training and a social worker by profession. My work has allowed me to look closely at realities, to listen to stories and to observe how the bonds between people are built — and also how they break. That is why, faced with the question of what Marie Eugénie's educational vision has to say today, perhaps my contribution is not to answer how we should educate, but to ask ourselves for what kind of world we are educating.
We live in a society where appearance takes up more and more space, and where success is often measured by what one owns, displays or achieves individually. Social media has amplified that logic: it would seem we must constantly prove that we are doing well, that we are moving forward, that we have, that we can.
But behind that shop window there is another reality.
There is an increasingly fragmented society, where community is hard work, where organising ourselves around what happens to us all seems more difficult, and where even those of us who belong to the working classes may end up aspiring more to resemble those who concentrate power and wealth than to recognise ourselves in those who share our own difficulties.
We were taught to aspire to rise, but perhaps we speak far too little about leaving no one at the bottom.
And meanwhile, we come to see as normal things that should shake us. We see rights violated and we carry on. We see inequality, violence, discrimination, death and exclusion until they become part of the landscape. We see how power can impose itself over the dignity of people and, too often, we end up believing that there is nothing we can do about it.
So I come back to Marie Eugénie.
Long before we spoke of competencies, educational innovation or skills for the future, she understood something essential, and she always said it: to educate was not only to transmit knowledge; it was to form people capable of transforming society.
Perhaps that is precisely what the world has still not quite understood.
Because forming a person cannot consist only in preparing them to compete, produce, climb or succeed. It should also mean forming human beings capable of looking at others and recognising them as equals; people who know how to be outraged in the face of injustice, who do not confuse success with superiority, who understand that their rights are bound to the rights of others, and who know how to build community in a time that constantly invites us to individualism.
It is not for me to say how education should go about it. But I can indeed challenge it from what I observe:
Can we really speak of formation when we produce extraordinarily competent people who are, nonetheless, indifferent to the pain of others? Can we consider sufficient an education that teaches us to conquer the world, but not also to question it? Because an education that develops abilities but not awareness of others may form successful people, but hardly a more human society.
And that is the powerful mission of the Assumption. That is the very essence of its educational proposal. As a former Assumption student, I believe that the Assumption still has much to say there.
Perhaps Marie Eugénie understood, a long time ago, something we are still trying to learn: that education does not truly transform the world when it forms people capable of going further, but when it forms people capable of asking themselves who is being left behind.
María José De Luca
Former Assumption student, 1997-1998
Province of Ecuador-Mexico