Opinion articles

One of the main tasks of universities is the generation of renewed knowledge, with a clear vision of service to society, to be published in academic journals that have a series of protocols that involve heavy bureaucratic apparatus designed for editorial analysis that accepts, denies or ask for corrections to the research results.

The positive effects of this way of proceeding are significant, since they allow to refine the proposals and promote progress towards new approaches based on serious work processes, aligned, of course, with international parameters that range from the way of writing and presenting to the content which should be considered as a contribution to the wealth of academic knowledge. This claim has clear scientific relevance, especially in relation to study and research in exact and experimental sciences. However, not all of us agree with the devastating one-dimensionality that is established, especially in relation to the humanist knowledge that entails, by its very nature, the development of reflections and analyzes that recurrently resort to traditional concepts, because of what is there It is about returning insistently to the understanding of the human condition that is not exhausted in the scientific but bursts into the spiritual and cultural, always changing and at the same time immutable.

The elections in Ecuador, these and others, are perceived as opportunities to resolve critical social conditions and prevent them from worsening, trying to put out fires generated by cultural forms that involve us all. Undoubtedly, despite collective responsibility, it must be done, because otherwise the fire spreads devastating even more. From this perspective, faced with the scourge, we must fight it and fight to stop the disaster with a view to the future reconstruction of what remains.

Today, the global and national reality –since the darkness of the pandemic– is marked by the urgency of vaccinating the population, a process that, in the Ecuadorian case, shows our precarious forces to solve social problems in an appropriate way. While other countries, with different social situations, show that their best level of social organization also works to plan and execute this type of process, we present ourselves as we are, with great economic limitations and also of conception, planning and execution to implement this urgent requirement on which our immediate future depends.

Yes, but not like this! I exclaim when I see what is happening in our country and in the world with massive clandestine or defiantly public gatherings, organized by people who position what they consider their rights against their duties to respect the law and the lives of others. The realization of these very personal demands is the result of a global culture that is more than tolerant in the face of the arbitrary exercise of the will of individuals, and less than lukewarm with regard to the demand to fulfill their responsibilities as citizens who live together in a scenario defined by systems. regulations that aim to favor community life to guarantee its sustainability over time. Because culturally the culmination of life achievements for a large part of the planet's inhabitants, and in our case Ecuador, is found in a non-critical concept of the exercise of freedom, which does not accept restrictions because it does not understand that the other and the environment socio-natural are the inevitable recipients of the effects of their positive or negative behaviors.

Permanently the Christian doctrine emerges and is positioned in the daily life of my professional life as a teacher, especially, because when I am in charge of legal matters such as Introduction to Law, Philosophy of Law and General Theory of the Norm, the reference to the thought of Jesus is inevitable, either to confirm the acceptance of its importance in legal institutions and in general in social life in a large part of the planet or to analyze those who contradict it, qualifying it as a generator of injustices and incorrect social development.

I write this column from my personal experience with the new forms of higher education in Ecuador. The intermediation of any of the virtual platforms that replace the physical space - classroom - in which we worked before implies new teaching practices that require the teacher a more exhaustive planning and a stricter discipline to fully comply with its objective considering the new elements, especially emotional, which are part of computer mediation.