This month of October, with a renewed impulse of youthful learning, the university classrooms and numerous business schools on the multifaceted Spanish student map have opened. It is an event that, although apparently frequent and routine, has a significance for the future hard to put into words. For that reason I did not want to lose the opportunity of making a reflection aloud on the double linked task of learning and teaching. So interlaced are both actions that they are even united in the same person. A lot is learnt through teaching and through learning, a lot is taught. (How many times do we believe we are learning and we are teaching? We believe we are teaching and we are learning!)

The term teaching comes from the Latin insignare that means to point out, and it is usually used to name a system organized in order to provide instruction in a certain subject by means of the effort of teachers and students. Teaching requires an authentic subjectivity by the students of that taught by the teacher. To obtain such an assimilation learning cannot be reduced to an activity carried out in the classrooms, by which a group of facts and doctrines is transmitted to the students orally. This reflection becomes especially important in Economics because of its practical and daily character. Something can be taught without the subjectivity of such knowledge modifying behaviour, but the best education is necessarily given when that learned is really put into practice. The objective that all science pursues is " knowledge " or " wisdom " within its particular field of performance. This knowledge gains in quality the more it is adapted to the human spirit, the more humanized it is.

Generally, we can say that there is education when something valuable is transmitted that is effectively put into practice by educating. A good education, on the other hand, demands that it is not a mere transmission of information, but rather that the conceptual foundations on which that is based are transmitted. To such effects, the teaching staff usually has a concept of themselves as a dialogic activity between who teaches and who receives the teaching. Anyway, discovering the most effective methods of teaching continues to be a very difficult to solve problem and numerous centuries of teaching have not solved it. Also until very recently, culture was so elitist and the knowledge to transmit so reduced, in comparison with that of today, that these problems with the current preponderance had not arisen.


Another characteristic of effective current teaching is the fact that our society, compared with the immobility of other centuries, is essentially changing. Due to that, the contents to explain are not something that can be determined once and for all and forever, nor can we insist, irresponsibly, on continuing to teach the same things that made sense in other times even recently. It is the mission of those who teach in each moment to try to determine those matters that constitute, as Ortega said, the nucleus of the living ideas of the present time. That evolution and adaptation to the current reality cannot be determinist but creative and harmonious once one affirms the progress that admits variation and free generation as such.

Teaching can have a first consequence which is that the student acts sheltered by the rules that have been exposed, without being able to give an explanation of them nor to have really captured their meaning. Such a performance, evidently, is contrary to a real human attitude. There is no possible self-criticism but a mere repetitive conformism that impedes development of one's own personality. Authentic education is that which passes from that stage to show the principles on which the taught behaviour is based. In this way, future performance will not only be aided by rules, but it will be able to invoke such rules. Such a capacity makes the action potentially self-critical and consequently, eliminates conformism and indiscriminate application of the rules, as well as facilitating personal advance and development that will give the appropriate answers before the new situations.

In university teaching the essential features of this ancient institution should appear, among those that it is necessary to highlight: universal concern for knowledge, freedom in the search for knowledge, spontaneity in the relationships between teachers and pupils or the independence of political power. The University has created a lifestyle that is inseparable from the western understanding of the world. In my opinion, humanities cannot be disconnected from professions related to economic administration, these being reduced to eminently technical actions. I do not consider that university style is enhanced when scientific technical culture is radically separated from humanities. We would have to recover the sense of the expression "being a university student" that implies a way of life, a global method of working, a vision of the world that remains stable but dynamically open once the classroom is left.

One of the substantial characteristics of our current society is that we are already in, and we are advancing more and more, towards a society of knowledge. In this situation, the universities should consider themselves as beacons of vital and cultural attraction. Knowledge is an emergent social value because it is necessary to consider it as the means of man's culture at the same time as an instrument of social and economic progress. In this new society of knowledge the schizophrenia of the two cultures in which humanities and technology are antagonistically polarised. The selfsame word " university " means opening to that which is universal, unit of the diverse, multilateral conjunction of efforts. The teaching and the learning of future economists and managers also have a crucial task before them in this sense.

Joseph John Franch Menéu
NEGOCIOS, Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th October 1996