The Challenge of Education in a Dark Era

Despite some people see values as an old fashioned concept, they’re still a matter of life and death in the social life. The social interaction owns its strength to the force of ethical values. Let's take a pressing example: Since its inception as an independent nation, Mexico has always had a problem with the standardization of values. Our society is living nowadays hard times mostly because there are no really internalized values in people’s minds.
This is the situation: families are not doing their job regarding to values. The only possible option to counteract this anomalous tendency is through school. Here, I mean school in the broad sense: education in values both for children and their parents, young people and their family. It is urgent to work in a new educational system that could warranty the birth of good citizens.
This proposal is far beyond mere rhetoric: is about the kind of social system we want for the future. According with thinkers like Immanuel Wallerstein and Peter Sloterdijk, the world-social system as we knew it is coming to an end, due to several problematic trends in world economy, State viability and social disorder worldwide. So, we need to work right now in the construction of the next one. It is absolutely necessary to retake the way of build-in ethics as the framework of our lives.

Social Unrest Worldwide

Both, little children and teenagers are in a period of life of brain-mind re-wiring. This leads to some fundamental social attitudes: the process of socialization and the modulation of violence. With this in mind, formal education has to work over a rich values environment.  Such environment has to be meaningful, long-lasting and charming for both little children and teenagers.
Since the Talcott Parsons’ work, we know that the only way to produce social interaction is through different sets of shared beliefs. Life in society functions primarily as a double way dynamic between common assumptions and personal decisions, which is the space of social common symbols. Our times need to imagine new ones, according to the present and actual challenges, such as the social unrest regarding politics, the caducity of the traditional family order and global economy perversions that push micro economy to the limit.
If I may use the expression, the tactic is kind of a “brain wash” to our new generations in order to create a new social basis. Three are the fundamental principles to work on: respect for human life and human dignity, respect for the environment and respect for themselves. Such must be a pervasive program, apart from politic interests and power group manipulation. Necessarily, the educational system is part of the State, in consequence the bid is to make its structures work beyond shortsighted partisan programs and mere electoral motivations.

The end of Elinghtment's Politics

Briefly, the previous outline is a proposal for a rational State interventionism. But State would not be alone in this crusade; the participation of the whole society is necessary to transform itself. Civil society, mass media and regular people must be involved in this process. So, it is mandatory to establish a large information campaign, public actions and remarks on the benefits that such change will produce in the way we are. Otherwise, our society would be doomed to implode into a savage community like some contemporary Failed-States nations. And, of course, that is a destiny that would seal forever the possibilities of our society.

On human misery and the mind drifting away

The theme of alcohol and drug addiction has been treated in several ways in contemporary cinema. We can cite films such as Figgi’s Leaving Las Vegas or Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream and, of course, the classic nineties’ dirty realistic epic on the matter, Boyle’s Trainspotting. But maybe there is nothing like the powerful, bare, outrageous and impressionist version of drug addiction and its consequences as Terry Gilliam’s Tideland.
Faithful to his dramatic, fabulist and daylight dreaming style, that has rendered amazing films such as Brazil, The Fisher King and 12 Monkeys; in his 2005 drama he manages to face the spectator with mind’s drifting away as a consequence of a life shaped entirely by drugs. Whose mind? Certainly the addicted one, but moreover the mind of his beloved ones. In this case Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), the ten year old daughter of a couple of heroin addicts whose way of life ends in their premature death by overdose.
We can interpret the strange and in a certain way funny girl’s mental life as a child’s thing; a way to escape to an unbearable situation, to handle the shock of having lost her parents in question of months by their selfish actions. But it’s more than that. We are no longer in front of a matter of decision, a determination of a free life election made by a young woman. On the contrary, we confront a living prison situation.  Jeliza-Rose is a prisoner of destiny. Her intense mental life, fulfilled with imaginary girlfriends made by her own fingers and old doll’s heads, her relationship and infatuation with a handicapped boy and her living with his father’s mummified corpse, turns her into a mental disabled person.

Tideland's Jeliza-Rose

One of the most disturbing things in Gilliam’s film is precisely the overlapping realities in the kid’s thought: the blurring transition between child’s play and schizophrenic episodes of insane fantasy. There’s a point where one is equal to the other. Perhaps in contemporary movies only David Lynch’s Lost Highway surpasses Gilliam’s precision to set in cinematographic language the mental insanity of a person.
So, she’s the one who carries the weight of her family sins (in this sense her encounter with a kind of witch neighbor, an ex-girlfriend of her father, is a representation of the demons from the past). Cornerstone of conservatism, but certainly an unavoidable starting point of socialization, family is the boiling point of mind's construction. When the natural imperfections of this psychobiological work are so much, it turns into a zone of deconstruction of human features that yields alienated individuals, living in misery inwards of their damaged mental life.
Jeliza-Rose’s character hits a deep nerve in the viewer's sensibility because she’s a very young person living a current tragedy only equipped with a common mental fire-exit: leaving the mind drifting away in the immense ocean of insanity, turning it into an outcast of our social diseases and our obstinate self-destructive spirit.
Contrary to the director’s pretention in the strange prologue to the film, this is not a story of a girl’s dreams and her desire to live, this is a powerful picture on some of the roots of our social dismal construction. In this way, American sociologist and thinker Immanuel Wallerstein has set up that drug addiction is a symptom of something deeper and much more urgent than a simple matter of law, police or personal disease; it is a kind of self-isolation from a reality so overwhelming that is better to get out from it. It’s a rebellion against the social system; a false one, alas, but the one that millions and millions of persons around the world have in hand despite a global structure that allows production, distribution, offering, acquisition and complicity of States, governments and institutions worldwide. 

As Peter Sloterdijk has established in his Magnus opera, Spheres, there is a major problem in the fourth sphere or fourth vital cover of infants; that is, in their socialization process since the birth's fact. We're receiving our children in a paradoxical world that is entirely efficient in pragmatic comfortability (medical technology, scientific survey of human body, and so on), but fails miserably to conform immune minds to neurosis, insecurity and fear. That's the echo of the actual world that sounds aloud in Tideland's fantasy, that's the electric shock that its terrible fantasy unchains in the viewer, no other than the dread of our times' possibilities.