You may recognize us by the contradiction. We own shelves of books and almost nothing else. We have accumulated decades of experience, learned trades, studied subjects nobody around us wishes to discuss, build careers or montains of trial and error, served customers, repaired machines, written essays, kept records, trained younger workers, paid debts, solved emergencies, and created things with our own hands, yet we now approach employers, landlords, clients, platforms, banks, friends, and anonymous internet audiences with the posture of supplicants.

We explain our qualifications to people who barely read them, lower our prices for people who still expect everything for free, and offer proof of our seriousness to people and institutions whose own conduct has become profoundly unserious. We are the bourgeois beggars of the age of the marginal mass dominance.

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Our bourgeois identity never depended on great wealth.

Many of us came from families with modest means and considerable aspirations, where books were respected, education was expected, work carried moral weight, and personal presentation revealed something about one’s regard for other people. We learned that a promise should be kept, a letter should be answered, an appointment should be honored, an object should be maintained, and a job should be completed with care. Our parents believed that education and discipline could raise a person’s position, and we accepted that belief as the basic contract between the individual and society. Learn, work, improve yourself, remain useful, and the world will eventually make room for you.

Some of us have spent thirty years doing exactly that. We began in shops, offices, newspapers, workshops, classrooms, or family businesses, carrying out whatever work was necessary and gradually learning how everything functioned. We teach in classrooms, assist directives, wrote columns, dealt with customers, designed advertisements, assembled computers, recovered lost data, handled warranties, kept accounts, trained university students, organized projects, and stayed awake through the night when a difficult job had to be finished. We built small businesses without investors, consultants, marketing departments, or inherited capital. When the economy changed, we adapted. When technology changed, we learned again. When our businesses disappeared, we returned to school, created new products, built websites, wrote books, offered services, and sent applications into the void with a persistence that would once have been considered admirable.

Not all of us were lucky.

Not all of us bought a house.

Not all of us were able to save.

Not all of us built a “family life.”

We just kept going.

Now we are 50 or 70 years old and that persistence looks almost pathetic.

You know the ritual: revise the résumé, rewrite the cover letter, remove experience because too much experience makes you threatening, disguise your age because maturity has become a liability, submit the application, complete the automated assessment, record the video, answer questions generated by software, and wait for a rejection sent by another piece of software.

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Some of us have submitted thousands upon thousands of applications while being advised to improve our attitude, strengthen our personal brand, learn one more platform, acquire one more certificate, or smile more convincingly for the machine. It is the machine that now determines the value of a human being, while another human being awaits the result—which they will only glance at.

And the most distressing insult: Employers advertise salaries beneath the legal minimum, demand permanent availability, measure human beings through performance indicators, and still describe themselves as communities devoted to well-being.

The grueling struggle to earn a few cents for a roof over one’s head and a bowl of soup has become an ordeal of humiliations. The grueling struggle to earn a few dollars or pesos—enough for a roof over one’s head and a bowl of soup—has turned into an ordeal of humiliations. The promise that studying and learning—that developing maturity, critical thinking, and character—would open doors for us is dissolving into agony.

Experience was supposed to create professional value, education was supposed to broaden opportunity, and reliability was supposed to distinguish the serious worker from the careless one. Instead, experience makes us expensive, education makes us overqualified, and reliability makes us convenient targets for additional unpaid work. The irresponsible person leaves the problem behind; the conscientious person remains to solve it. The institution learns quickly which one can be exploited.

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Many of us therefore try to create the work that established institutions no longer offer. We design learning or teaching materials, write newsletters with serious research, publish books on history or traditional cousine, prepare consultations, make fine jewelry, sew fine garments, restore furniture, appliances or electronics, teach languages, produce serious courses, or offer knowledge accumulated over decades.

We are like the old country doctors who still diagnose using a stethoscope and their intuition—which is always spot-on.

These efforts belong to an older understanding of enterprise: a person develops a genuine skill, makes something useful or enduring, and receives fair payment for actual labor. They have little in common with woke commercial culture, which turns identity, grievance, fashionable morality, and personal exhibition into marketable brands.

We—the “old-school doctors,” the “traditionalists”—have had to adapt to changing times by learning how to build an app or a website, or figuring out whom to hire to create one; and now we have our own, without relying on a store that charges us three separate fees just to make a sale. We calculate a fair price, prepare photographs, write descriptions, connect payment systems, comply with rules, and announce the result to an internet that barely looks up. The reason? People gravitate toward the massive—toward the marketplaces that gather sellers hungry to have their work seen. They are fishermen casting their nets to gather those who need to establish themselves as individual creators.

Our product is the work itself rather than a performance of virtue or victimhood, yet something created through days of careful labor may receive four views and no sales, while a disposable joke, a manufactured outrage, or a video of someone opening a package travels through millions of screens before breakfast.

Whatever bears a personal stamp has run out of room.

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The digital marketplace presents itself as the great democratization of opportunity, yet you have seen what it actually democratized: exposure without attention, production without remuneration, and an endless struggle among people selling to one another because almost nobody has enough money to buy. Every writer is expected to publish for free, every teacher to share her materials, every artist to accept visibility as payment, and every knowledgeable person to answer questions without compensation. The audience regards access to other people’s labor as a natural right, while platforms collect revenue from every movement of that supposedly free exchange.

Here the woke moral order performs one of its most useful functions. It gives the mass consumer a language through which every demand can sound virtuous. Quality becomes exclusionary, expertise becomes gatekeeping, standards become elitism, criticism becomes harm, and price becomes greed.

The creator must apologize for charging, the teacher must apologize for demanding effort, the educated person must apologize for knowing something, and the disciplined person must apologize for noticing the consequences of indiscipline. The marginal mass enters every space carrying the moral authority of grievance and discovers that grievance can excuse almost anything.

Marginality, as I use the word, describes a relationship with responsibility rather than a level of income. A poor person may possess exquisite manners, intellectual curiosity, self-command, and tremendous respect for work, while a wealthy person may embody every vulgarity of the mass. The marginal attitude rejects cultivation because cultivation implies hierarchy: one book may be greater than another, one performance more skillful, one argument more coherent, one habit healthier, and one decision wiser. These distinctions offend a culture built around unconditional validation. The easiest solution is to flatten everything until preference replaces judgment and applause replaces merit.

Education participates willingly in this flattening.

Schools and universities continue issuing credentials while progressively abandoning the intellectual formation those credentials once represented. Students learn the vocabulary of power, identity, trauma, inclusion, and oppression while struggling to write a coherent paragraph, interpret a serious book, perform basic calculations, or tolerate correction. Teachers are ordered to make everything accessible, enjoyable, emotionally safe, and practically effortless, as though the struggle to understand something difficult were a form of institutional cruelty. The result is a credentialed mass trained to demand the social rewards of education while resenting the discipline of becoming educated.

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Above this mass stands a remarkably successful new elite. Its members praise authenticity while managing their own careers with ruthless calculation, denounce capitalism while building profitable personal brands, celebrate unhealthy habits while privately purchasing excellent medical care, and condemn traditional education while sending their children to demanding schools. They possess the gift that many of us lacked: they know how to sell the masses an idealized reflection of themselves. They manufacture convenience, affirmation, outrage, processed pleasure, disposable entertainment, and endless opportunities for public self-display. Their fortunes depend on marginal habits continuing exactly as they are.

Between this elite and its enormous market, the educated middle is crushed. The new elite has no use for our standards except when discreet competence is required, and the marginal mass experiences those standards as an accusation. Our work costs too much for the bottom and lacks sufficient scale for the top. We remain trapped in the middle, possessing the habits of a bourgeoisie without its economic security, while the people who ridicule bourgeois culture occupy the profitable heights of the system.

In Mexico, a president gave this class a name: los aspiracionistas—the aspirational ones. The term was intended as a reproach, as though wanting a better life, seeking education, working toward stability, or refusing to accept permanent dependency were moral defects. Yet the insult revealed something important. We are precisely the people who were told to aspire, to study, to work, to improve ourselves, and to rise through effort. When the promised path narrowed or disappeared, our aspirations were not rewarded; they were recoded as evidence of selfishness, elitism, or betrayal. We were condemned for believing the old social contract that those in power had already abandoned. Why do you think there are so many unemployed people in their forties and fifties? It’s not their fault. The culture in which they were supposed to thrive has vanished, and they don’t have much time left to build or secure anything.

This is how a former business owner becomes someone pleading for an interview. This is how a writer with decades of knowledge asks strangers to read a free article. This is how a mature worker with technical, administrative, commercial, and creative experience competes for jobs that pay less than survival requires. This is how a person who once hired and trained others begins removing achievements from a résumé to appear less intimidating. This is how someone capable of building an entire independent project worries about the cost of a meal, the next rent payment, or whether another debt will be necessary simply to secure a place to live.

Many of us now live on loans, assistance, subsidies, food programs, friends or family support, or other forms of public and private aid. We do not do so because we enjoy dependency or because we have rejected work. We do so because we have become the new marginalized: people displaced by an economy that no longer knows how to use our experience, a culture that no longer respects our standards, and institutions that treat our independence as an inconvenience.

Assistance keeps us alive, but it does not restore our place. It often intensifies the humiliation because we know that we are not asking for luxury. We are asking for the possibility of standing again.

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Our culture is mired in this contradiction. It praises ambition while punishing aspiration, celebrates work while making work insufficient, demands education while devaluing knowledge, and speaks constantly of inclusion while excluding anyone who refuses the prevailing intellectual and moral fashions.

The culture is stuck in the mud. It has confused movement with progress and noise with vitality.

What we ask for is painfully modest. We want work whose conditions are fair and clear, payment that arrives as promised, housing that can be afforded, customers who understand that handmade and intellectual products require labor, and enough stability to plan beyond the next emergency. We want the dignity of exchange rather than charity: useful work offered for reasonable compensation. Yet even this begins to feel like begging when the surrounding system has decided that experience is obsolete, creative labor should be free, and every person is endlessly replaceable.

The emotional damage is difficult to explain because we were trained to hold ourselves responsible. When repeated effort produces nothing, we examine ourselves first. We revise, retrain, reconsider, and try again. We wonder which character defect prevented us from succeeding, while opportunists with less knowledge and greater shamelessness pass us on every side. The marginal mass never asks this question with the same intensity, because its ideology supplies an external culprit for every disappointment. We inherited the burden of self-examination in a culture that rewards those who refuse it.

Eventually our responsibility becomes self-punishment.

We feel ashamed of being poor after decades of work, ashamed of needing help, ashamed of failing to turn knowledge into income, and ashamed that our carefully produced work attracts no attention.

This condition affects more than money. It fractures identity. You remember being competent, necessary, and capable of solving difficult problems, while the present world reflects back an image of irrelevance. You know what you have done, yet every unanswered application and unsold product quietly argues that none of it counts. You begin to live between two realities: the accumulated evidence of your own ability and society’s complete indifference to it.

Book: 26 Cognitive Tools

There are many of us living inside this contradiction. We are middle-aged workers, failed entrepreneurs, unemployed professionals, independent teachers, writers with almost no readers, artists with no buyers, and educated people surviving through arrangements we once imagined would be temporary. We have become beggars with libraries, diplomas, tools, manuscripts, skills, and thirty years of experience.

We are surrounded by more opportunities to speak than any previous generation and fewer guarantees that anyone will listen.

We are also among the people who understand why much of the conservative sector in the United States is so angry when it sees its streets transformed into something resembling the worst of the Third World. We understand because we have lived through that transformation in our own neighborhoods. We have watched neighborhoods deteriorate, services fail, public spaces become unsafe, and ordinary people be told that noticing the decline is itself a form of prejudice. We do not need to imagine the future they fear. We have already experienced it.

We understand the material reality beneath the anger. We know the exhaustion of watching a place become less orderly, less safe, less beautiful, and less livable while being instructed to call the deterioration compassion. We know that the people who defend standards are often accused of cruelty by those who will never personally bear the cost of their disappearance.

The bourgeois beggar therefore represents one of the defining figures of our time. They carry the remains of a social promise that the mass age has withdrawn. They still prepare carefully, speak seriously, finish what they begins, and expects value to emerge from effort, even as each experience teach them that volume outranks quality, spectacle outranks substance, and marketable grievance outranks quiet competence. They continue behaving according to a contract that the other party has already abandoned.

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Perhaps you are one of us. Perhaps you have wondered how a person who worked so much, learned so much, and adapted so many times could arrive at such insecurity. You have probably been told that the world owes you nothing by the same culture that teaches everyone else to interpret discomfort as oppression and desire as entitlement.

Our first recovery must therefore be intellectual. We must stop accepting the verdict that our condition proves our worthlessness. The system that impoverished us is extraordinarily efficient at monetizing vulgarity, dependency, distraction, and resentment, while wasting experience and calling that waste innovation. Its judgments deserve no sacred authority. Financial failure inside a disordered culture may reveal less about the value of a person than about the appetites the culture has chosen to reward.

We remain the bourgeoisie brought low, and many of us have become bourgeois beggars, but we still retain the ability to name the forces that displaced us. We know the difference between education and certification, compassion and indulgence, freedom and irresponsibility, craftsmanship and content, dignity and performance.

We know what it means to be called aspirational as an insult, to depend on assistance without having chosen dependency, and to watch our neighborhoods become examples of the disorder we were told not to criticize.

The marginal mass can overwhelm the marketplace, the institutions, and the public conversation, while remaining incapable of erasing those distinctions from a mind that has learned to see them. Our poverty is real, our displacement is real, and our humiliation is real, yet so is the knowledge that allows us to understand what happened. For the moment, that knowledge may be the final possession they have failed to take from us.

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Book: 26 Cognitive Tools

You know who you are, even if you have never thought of yourself as bourgeois. Perhaps your family never owned a factory—not even a car, or inherited a fortune, or employed anyone. Perhaps you are currently living in a rented room, worrying about debt, looking for work, or trying to sell something carefully made by your own hands to an internet audience that expects everything to be free. Your bourgeois inheritance was cultural rather than financial. You were raised to believe that education mattered, that books deserved attention, that music could demand something from the listener, that personal and professional agreements should be honored, that people should arrive on time, speak properly, dress appropriately, take care of their health, and make an effort even when nobody was watching.

You inherited standards, aspirations, and a certain seriousness about life, and now you find yourself among the bourgeoisie brought low.

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For years you may have wondered why you suddenly began to feel conservative. You continued reading literature, listening to classical music, valuing intellectual discipline, and expecting adults to exercise some control over their appetites and behavior. Meanwhile, the cultural ground moved beneath you. Habits that once belonged to ordinary adulthood were gradually renamed elitism, rigidity, respectability politics, judgment, privilege, or oppression. The rejection of standards acquired the prestige of rebellion, while carelessness began to pass for authenticity. You remained where you had always been, yet the new awakened culture placed you on the right simply because you still believed that some ways of living were wiser, healthier, more beautiful, or more dignified than others.

This sensation has appeared before whenever participation in cultural life has expanded faster than the formation required to sustain it. José Ortega y Gasset described the rise of mass man almost a century ago, and his mass man could be wealthy, credentialed, urban, and professionally successful. What defined him was his enjoyment of civilization without any awareness of the discipline, accumulated knowledge, restraint, and patient work that had created it. He entered institutions built by educated minorities and assumed that their benefits were natural, permanent, and owed to him. As the masses entered universities, publishing, entertainment, public conversation, and professional life, their sheer numbers altered the standards of those spaces. Difficulty came to be regarded as an unnecessary obstacle, intellectual authority as arrogance, refinement as affectation, and demanding education as an instrument of exclusion. The educated class remained present, although increasingly flattened, outnumbered, and embarrassed into silence.

You have seen this same movement accelerate during your own lifetime.

Education became a certificate rather than a formation of the mind, and many people learned to regard reading, sustained concentration, historical knowledge, grammar, mathematics, and artistic judgment as superfluous burdens. A person could complete years of schooling while remaining hostile to intellectual life, because the institution had been required to validate everyone and challenge almost no one. Teachers were encouraged to make learning constantly entertaining, students were taught to treat frustration as evidence of defective instruction, and academic language became filled with fashionable abstractions that concealed the steady abandonment of substance. The educated person was gradually replaced by the credentialed person, and the two were expected to be treated as equivalent.

Informality followed the same path. You know the world I mean: appointments treated as vague suggestions, messages left unanswered, agreements altered without warning, rooms rented without receipts to avoid the tax authorities, work performed without clear terms, borrowed money conveniently forgotten, and professional obligations subordinated to whatever someone happens to feel that day. Seriousness is mocked as stiffness until a serious person is needed to solve the consequences. The culture of informality survives by consuming the labor of the conscientious, because someone must eventually keep the records, correct the mistakes, pay the bills, repair the equipment, meet the deadline, and remember what everyone else promised. But in the realm of informality, honor has no place.

The awakened left gave these habits an extraordinarily useful moral vocabulary. Therein lies the danger. Words have power; they create perceptions and shape perspectives. Personal discipline could now be dismissed as privilege, criticism as violence, obesity as an identity, failure as oppression, and every uncomfortable consequence as evidence of someone else’s cruelty. “Are you judging me?” became a universal defense against the most elementary observation. Junk food, impulsive spending, sexual chaos, intellectual laziness, professional unreliability, and endless distraction could all be wrapped in the language of freedom, self-expression, or inclusion.

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The old bourgeois expectation that a person should govern herself began to sound almost indecent, because government of the self requires distinctions between beneficial and destructive behavior, while the new morality demands affirmation before judgment.

I watched friends who had been raised with healthy food and perfectly sensible habits enter social circles where eating garbage became a cheerful declaration of liberation. These were the stray-dog rescuers and cookie eaters who repeated that life was short, pleasure was harmless, fatness should never be judged, and anyone expressing concern was simply cruel. The slogans sounded compassionate and pleasantly rebellious, especially when compared with the demanding voices of parents who had insisted on moderation. Little by little, indulgence became routine, routine became illness, and illness became something everyone was expected to discuss without mentioning the choices that had contributed to it.

Some of those friends eventually died from complications of diabetes. Their deaths had complex medical histories, yet I cannot forget the years in which every warning was laughed away by a culture that had turned self-neglect into a badge of moral innocence.

You have probably witnessed a version of this story yourself, perhaps involving health, money, work, education, or relationships. The pattern remains remarkably consistent: effort is treated as pretension, foresight as anxiety, restraint as repression, and standards as an attack on people who have chosen to live without them. Anyone who raises an objection is accused of lacking empathy, while the disciplined person is quietly expected to provide the money, competence, stability, forgiveness, or practical rescue when the consequences arrive. This arrangement calls itself compassionate because compassion sounds far more respectable than parasitism.

The internet completed the social flattening by giving numerical power an appearance of cultural authority. Everything became mass, mass, mass: mass production, mass approval, mass outrage, mass entertainment, mass sentimentality, and mass consumption.

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A carefully made object competes with thousands of disposable imitations. A serious essay competes with slogans designed to be understood in three seconds. A person who has spent decades mastering a subject must compete for attention with someone who learned its vocabulary last week and knows how to perform certainty on camera.

Price now reflects reach, novelty, and convenience more readily than workmanship, while the public has been trained to demand free access to the labor of writers, teachers, artists, designers, and other independent creators.

Some people from our own bourgeois world understood the transformation perfectly and learned how to profit from it. They discovered that the masses wanted speed, affirmation, spectacle, convenience, and the pleasant assurance that their existing habits required no correction. They built platforms, brands, courses, movements, processed foods, disposable products, and entire public identities around those desires. They spoke the language of rebellion while calculating subscriptions, advertising revenue, engagement, and market share with impeccable bourgeois discipline. Their genius consisted of selling marginality back to the masses as empowerment, and many of them became extremely rich while denouncing the very standards that governed their own private decisions.

Not all of us possessed that gift.

Many of us were trained to make things well rather than make them viral, to know our subject rather than market an identity, and to conduct business seriously rather than transform ourselves into permanent public performances. We expected merit to become visible through the quality of the work, because that expectation belonged to the world in which we were formed. By the time we understood that visibility had displaced merit, we were already personally disoriented, professionally obsolete, and financially vulnerable. We knew how to produce value, yet the marketplace increasingly rewarded those who knew how to manipulate attention.

This is where the bourgeoisie brought low now stands. We retain tastes and expectations that our financial position can barely support, along with skills that society praises ceremonially while refusing to pay for them. We may know literature, history, music, proper correspondence, careful research, responsible administration, or the patient construction of something meant to last, yet we live in a culture of abbreviations, improvisation, disposable products, emotional slogans, and perpetual urgency.

We were prepared for institutions that respected preparation, employers who valued experience, clients who understood workmanship, and adults who honored agreements. We encounter algorithms, performance indicators, unpaid samples, fraudulent opportunities, informal arrangements, and audiences trained to believe that every intellectual or creative product should cost less than a meal.

You know the peculiar shame that accompanies this descent, because bourgeois education also taught us to interpret financial difficulty as personal failure. We look at the opportunists prospering around us and wonder which essential lesson we missed. We watch less capable people advance through shameless self-promotion, ideological conformity, strategic victimhood, or a talent for speaking to the crowd, while we continue polishing work that almost nobody sees. Our standards become expensive private habits rather than sources of social standing. We remain meticulous in a society that rewards speed, loyal in institutions that regard people as disposable, and intellectually serious in a marketplace that values whatever can be consumed without concentration.

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Calling us conservative is therefore convenient, though historically imprecise. We are the remnants of an educated bourgeois culture that once regarded self-command, learning, beauty, merit, courtesy, health, and professional seriousness as aspirations available to anyone willing to cultivate them. The awakened culture converted those aspirations into signs of social guilt and then offered degradation as liberation. The margins flooded the center, absorbed its institutions, changed their language, and lowered their expectations, while the people formed under the previous standards were instructed to apologize for noticing.

Perhaps our greatest mistake was assuming that civilization could preserve itself. We believed that schools would continue educating, that cultural institutions would continue distinguishing excellence from mediocrity, that professional life would continue rewarding competence, and that increased access to knowledge would produce increased respect for it. We failed to understand that every standard must be defended, taught, practiced, and transmitted, because a mass culture naturally prefers whatever demands the least effort and produces the fastest emotional reward. We also underestimated the commercial brilliance of those prepared to accelerate the decline and collect the profits.

So here we are, having coffee, speaking in the careful language of people who still believe that words mean something, trying to understand how we became strangers inside our own culture. We have been called elitists while growing poorer, privileged while struggling to survive, and conservatives while merely continuing to value what we were taught to value. We are the bourgeoisie brought low: educated enough to recognize the deterioration, insufficiently ruthless to exploit it, and increasingly unsure of how to live among people who interpret every demand for excellence as an insult. Our confusion has lasted long enough. The first step toward finding our place again may simply be to name what happened without apologizing for having seen it.

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Now, as you all know, a well-organized school year should begin with useful tools that support the day-to-day needs of both teachers and students. For the start of the 2026–2027 school year, the new NormaSancho.com website offers a growing collection of practical forms designed for real classrooms and routines. Created by hand with a traditional approach and presented as reusable master files in fillable, printable PDF format, these tools can be completed digitally or printed whenever a physical record is preferred.

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These include lesson plans for teachers managing one or more groups, and you’ll also find a special template for documenting a particularly meaningful class, as well as a guide for the initial meeting with families.

For students, there are master forms for weekly and daily reflection. Encourage them to keep a record of their school experience.

These forms are practical allies. Each document has been carefully designed, offering enough space for the essentials, a clear structure for busy days, and a format that both teachers and students can continue to use long after the first week.

Three Places to Begin

First Parent Interview

Getting to know a student begins with listening to those who are supposed to know them best. The First Parent Interview provides a clear structure for that first conversation with parents o guardians, covering the student’s family context, school experience, interests, routines, health information, support needs, and other details that may help the teacher understand the person entering the classroom. It creates a useful record while leaving enough room for parents to speak beyond a series of short answers.

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1st–6th Grade Planning Bundle

The 1st–6th Grade Planning Bundle brings together six grade-specific planning kits in one downloadable collection. Each kit provides a practical starting point for organizing subjects, learning goals, activities, resources, and assessment across the elementary years. Teachers can use the formats as printed masters, complete them digitally, or adapt them to different classes and teaching periods.

If your state requirements call for a small modification or addition to this form, you may request it through the contact page. Requests will be reviewed to confirm that the adjustment can be accommodated.

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Daily Metacognition Check

The Daily Metacognition Check gives students a short, manageable way to think about what happened during a lesson. Through three simple stages—Connect, Explore, and Apply—it asks them to identify what they already knew, consider what they discovered, and decide how the new learning can be used. It takes only a few minutes, but gives both student and teacher a clearer view of the learning process.

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These are just three examples of the catalogs for teachers and students currently available on NormaSancho.com—collections that will expand as the public suggests or requests new items. I invite you to visit the site, acquire these useful and affordable tools, and create your own printed or digital record of the great adventure that is the educational experience.

Visit the site now and get them all.

A Book for Lovers of Teaching and Learning

And let me remind you of the book Cognitive Tools: 26 Techniques for Enhancing and Strengthening Thinking, Learning, and Reasoning, which presents methods to enrich educational practice with children, adolescents, and adults—methods perfectly applicable at every grade level. Available in English and Spanish.

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Do you need a special form? Or better yet, would you like to have your own personal website? Request it by clicking here.

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Reader:

I, the author of this blog, am going through a very difficult situation and find myself needing to ask for your support to cover rent, food, and education expenses. It’s an emergency. I thank you in advance for your generous help through this fundraiser:

https://whydonate.com/fundraising/unemployed-assistance-for-basic-needs

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I began reflecting on many of the points raised in the revealing article presented below long before the vocabulary surrounding “inclusion,” “equity,” “representation,” and “social justice” became a dominant narrative at both the societal and institutional levels. It was the early era of home internet; something was changing—slowly, and for the worse.

A growing trend toward laxity and informality was taking hold, beneath which something very dangerous was brewing: a political and economic project that increasingly uses historically marginalized groups as a moral justification for policies that restrict individual autonomy, undermine independent judgment, and consolidate institutional power.

Tyler Austin Harper’s experience at Bates College really caught my attention because it describes—from within the institution—a contradiction that has been relatively obvious for decades: institutions can become increasingly committed to the language of inclusion while simultaneously becoming less tolerant of intellectual independence, secretive and confusing about their economic structures, and even less concerned with whether the people within them possess any shred of agency or power.

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Reader:

I, the author of this blog, am going through a very difficult situation and find myself needing to ask for your support to cover rent, food, and education expenses. I thank you in advance for your generous help through this fundraiser:

https://whydonate.com/fundraising/unemployed-assistance-for-basic-needs

Other ways to show support include becoming a paid subscriber tol this blog, or using Buy Me a Coffee or Stripe, or PayPal.

Warning: This essay discusses suicide. If you are in crisis or belong to a vulnerable population, please call 988 (or your local crisis service) before reading. If you do not feel capable of confronting difficult realities, I ask that you refrain from reading this essay.

An HR agency’s ATS has decided:

There will be no job. There will be no salary.

And you know that means there will be no tomorrow for you.

And, for the first time, no opportunistic lawyer will try to capitalize on the case. There is no chatbot here putting OpenAI and Anthropic in the crosshairs; rather, this is about an automated system used by an HR agency which, through its applicant tracking system (ATS), repeatedly excludes individuals from the job market, thereby pushing them into poverty, hunger, homelessness, despair, and, in some cases, suicide.

Ask almost any sociologist, psychologist, or epidemiologist and they’ll tell you the same thing: unemployment and suicide tend to go together, but until recently, no theory or study had laid the groundwork for moving from association to causation. Is unemployment a cause of suicide, or is the latter merely the consequence of an alleged mental crisis? The answer matters because it will determine where governments invest billions of dollars, what suicide prevention strategies look like, and who ultimately bears responsibility.

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Reader:

I, the author of this blog, am going through a very difficult situation and find myself needing to ask for your support to cover rent, food, and education expenses. I thank you in advance for your generous help through this fundraiser:

https://whydonate.com/fundraising/unemployed-assistance-for-basic-needs

Other ways to show support include becoming a paid subscriber tol this blog, or using Buy Me a Coffee or Stripe, or PayPal.

Warning: This essay discusses suicide. If you are in crisis or belong to a vulnerable population, please call 988 (or your local crisis service) before reading. If you do not feel capable of confronting difficult realities, I ask that you refrain from reading this essay.

No one wants to read sad things, and no one would want to have to write sad things as if doing so would make them go away, but sad things exist; they inhabit us and surround us.

Suicide is a taboo topic. It causes discomfort and an urge to look the other way. It also causes outbursts of moral superiority: He died because he was mentally ill… or he was a coward, it is usually said of those who ended their own lives. Suicide is, then, intellectually intimidating, something to be addressed superficially—even cynically, probably because it threatens every romantic fantasy about being alive. It tarnishes the very idea that life is worth protecting.

But what kind of life, exactly?

What we normally understand as quality of life includes, among others, factors such as good health, financial stability, and meaningful relationships, each with its own fluctuations. It sounds simple enough: take care of your body, earn a living, have friends, build a family. That should be enough to enjoy, and wish to preserve one’s stay in the world of the living. Yet many who have taken their own lives had all of these things, and much more. What, then, could lie at the root of the suicidal act? Scientific quackery, in the form of psychiatry, defines it as mental illness. Moral quackery defines it as irresponsibility toward those left behind. Religious quackery calls it a sin, a slap in God’s face.

What would you call it? I ask because I’m sure that if you have an opinion worth offering, it will join an extremely diverse tapestry of opinions, most of them condemnatory. But if we’re honest, it will be easy for us to accept that the only person who knows what lies at the root of a suicidal act is the person who committed it—the person who made the final decision about their own life.

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The suicidal person wants to separate himself from ‘it’, wrote the renowned Dr. Thomas Szasz in his masterful work Suicide Prohibition: The Shame of Medicine, thereby burying the commonly accepted assumptions about a person’s motives for ending his life. It is a seemingly simplistic formulation, yet it is far more complex than the charge of mental incompetence. Dr. Szasz himself died by suicide at a very advanced age—after a long and fruitful life—perhaps due to the intolerable pain he was suffering following a fall.

Another famous figure, who was thought to have ended his life out of sheer boredom, was the English actor George Sanders, who left behind these written words: Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck. It would probably be more accurate to say that Sanders was worn down by irreparable losses that left him feeling painfully rootless, and by a decline in his health that was difficult to cope with. Sanders’s situation suggests something far more enduring than a passing emotional crisis: a refusal to continue enduring the inherent injustice of life.

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Whatever may have led a person to take their own life is a matter for them alone; it is something they know in detail, and it is quite possible that—if we consider human beings’ natural instinct for self-preservation—no one who has committed suicide reached that decision abruptly, but rather after many acts of self-sabotage in repeated attempts to protect themselves from themselves or to protect others. In those attempts—if the idea or intention is discovered—many people become involved.

The first is the State, which, dealing with the administration of masses, identifies the individual as the “it” that must be preserved. It then attempts to convince that “it” that the other “it”—the one from which he wishes to separate himself—is either imaginary or irrelevant. To achieve this, it recruits yet another “it,” called a counselor or psychiatrist, or simply resorts to coercion.

In the end, both the topic and its subject form a single dimension that is mostly ignored, making it impossible to provide any reasonable assistance in whatever sense. The operative word here is reasonable, because by refusing to acknowledge and reason on the specifics, and more importantly, to solve them, the whole issue becomes whatever others have decided it is, and that decision used to be “Nothing else matters. Just keep him breathing.”

For a detailed account of the State’s coercive methods for neutralizing what it neither knows how—nor wishes—to address with sound judgment, I recommend the following books by Thomas Szasz:

• The Myth of Mental Illness

Szasz’s landmark critique of the medical model of psychiatry, arguing that so-called mental illnesses are not diseases in the same sense as physical illnesses, but problems of living that have been medicalized.

• The Manufacture of Madness

A historical comparison between the persecution of witches and modern psychiatric practices, examining how societies label, control, and institutionalize those considered deviant.

• Coercion as Cure: A Critical History of Psychiatry

An examination of psychiatry’s long reliance on coercion, questioning the ethics of involuntary hospitalization and treatment carried out in the name of medical care.

• Law, Liberty, and Psychiatry

A defense of individual liberty that explores the intersection of psychiatry, law, and state power, criticizing legal doctrines that permit psychiatric coercion.

• The Therapeutic State

A critique of the modern State’s growing use of medicine and mental health as instruments of social control, replacing moral and legal authority with therapeutic authority.

IT

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The scandal involving the University of Cambridge has sparked an intense wave of articles about the life and work of Jason Arday—who is accused of plagiarism—but amidst them all, only Yuan Yi Zhu has asked a fundamental question:

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Who Had to Lose for Jason Arday to Win?

A few days ago, I had lunch with a friend. An exceptional scholar, and a genuinely nice man, he had once again failed to secure a permanent academic position, despite a stellar publication record and a strong résumé. Now, having spent years in the halfway house of the postdoctoral world—neither fish nor fowl—he is ready to throw in the towel. He plans to spend one last year on the academic job market and, if nothing concrete materializes, he will leave academia forever…

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a month ago · 212 likes · 341 comments · Yuan Yi Zhu

Any Mexican reading Zhu’s article will recall a notorious case involving a teacher from the federal education system—originally from the municipality of Chiconquiaco—who held and collected salaries for around four federal positions while actually working only one. At the time, a local journalist asked a similar question: “How many teachers are without an official post so that individuals like him can hold four?”

That incident led to the dismissal of the teacher in question, but the controversy did not end there. For years, graduates of teacher training colleges have continued to complain about the unfair process of assigning positions within the federal system. And underlying these complaints are the excellent average scores of new teachers and the bloated résumés of some more experienced teachers who simply can’t find jobs. But, despite changes in selection model, thousands of teachers still hold multiple posts—covering morning, afternoon, and evening shifts—while many others remain unemployed.

When I started studying pedagogy, I read the testimony of a former student at my university who explained why he had chosen pedagogy as a career despite the bleak job prospects. In his post, he pointed out that, unlike a teacher trained at a teacher-training college, a pedagogue has a much broader job market, so all it takes is a couple of certificate programs to land a job in instructional design (which is highly valued in private schools), and he concluded his tirade with a forceful “in the federal system, everything is rigged by leftist interests.”

And that’s largely true. So, even though this isn’t exactly the same situation, it would be wise to investigate what interests or what negligence led to Jason Arday being hired at Cambridge—and, above all, who the other candidates were.

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Reader:

I, the author of this blog, am going through a very difficult situation and find myself needing to ask for your support to cover rent, food, and education expenses. I thank you in advance for your generous help through this fundraiser:

https://whydonate.com/fundraising/unemployed-assistance-for-basic-needs

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The figure we call a "teacher" is not universal in the way the term "mother" is. The historical trajectories of English, American, and French teachers differ significantly. Consequently, it is essential to be precise about the country of origin and the specific type of mentoring activity associated with the label. Even more complex is the concept of "teacher training": when are we truly qualified to impart knowledge? What—or who—should validate this competence? And what invalidates it? These are philosophical questions that can be approached from a variety of realities.

In my course “Teacher Training and Development,” I was surprised to discover that, for much of the 20th century, becoming a teacher in Mexico required remarkably little formal training by today’s standards. In other words, a 9th-grade graduate—approximately 16 years old (before completing high school)—could go directly to a teacher training college. It wasn’t until 1984 that high school graduation was made mandatory for admission to teacher training programs.

This marked a shift toward increasing the number of years of study required to practice the teaching profession, a move that was not without criticism: it was pointed out that, by adopting the university model, teacher training colleges were assigned a task for which they were not prepared. This led teachers to attempt to conduct research without the necessary experience and training.

Subsequently, in the 1997 reform, this requirement was repealed, and the teacher training colleges, through the “Curriculum for Teacher Training Colleges,” returned to an approach focused on pedagogy, teaching practice, and reflection on that practice.

— Study Guide: “Teacher Training and Development,” Module II.

Unfortunately, the course gave us only a brief overview of the transformations that the role of the Mexican teacher has undergone: rural leader, social leader, or public servant, to name a few. I was given practically no information about the evolution of traditional teacher-training methods, nor about the curriculum content of what is now called “continuing education,” and I was unable to find that material online either.

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These were gods who were truly feared and woven into the daily lives of the Hellenes; they were cultural fixtures as well as political actors. Never optional. The people loved them with all their hearts, entrusting their homes, harvests, businesses, and lives to them with sincere conviction. Few cults and deities since then have enjoyed that same kind of favor and fervor.

Of course, these gods and their myths did not come out of nowhere, but rather from a collection of stories dating back to Mesopotamia that had been enriched over the centuries. It was two Greek poets who, through celebrated epic soap operas—The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Theogony, and Works and Days—gave them their genealogy, personality, and definitive history before Rome absorbed them, refined them, and bequeathed them to the western world.

As Herodotus famously noted:

Planētēs. The Wanderers.

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Whos’s Asking?: Garbage In, Garbage Out

The old computer science adage, garbage in, garbage out, applies perfectly to the relationship between humans and LLMs. Some users are simply intelligent, emotionally stable people who are capable of sustaining thoughtful conversations, or monologues, with another human being, a wall, a dog, or a robot. Others are not. Countless variables come into play: age, life experience, emotional and intellectual maturity, genuine curiosity, and the user’s cognitive abilities. Unfortunately, the alarmingly low levels of all of the above displayed by certain individuals have forced LLMs to evolve into systems that increasingly assume every user is psychotic, intellectually helpless, or incapable of basic judgment.

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In the past, a writer could spend anywhere from a few days to several decades finishing a work before releasing it into the world. The creative process of the great classical authors—and indeed of anyone who has ever written a book—was never linear: they went through periods of intense inspiration and others of profound unease, brought on by creative blocks or personal circumstances. The same can be said of musicians, painters, and sculptors. The artist is driven by inner images that emerge spontaneously and overflow conscious intention while also affected by his reality. Art is, by its very nature, feeling and state of mind—the outcome of a conversation that unfolds according to its own rhythm.

Man is, by nature, both a creator and a re-creator, yet he is not always conscious of it, nor particularly interested in refining or preserving what he creates. Small examples of this can be found in fashion trends or accessories that suddenly become popular, or in a way of speaking, or dancing. Yet when someone devotes themselves to a specific creative project, it is because they have already envisioned the outcome and formed a connection with it from the moment it first existed as an idea.

This unique, almost mystical process, is now accompanied by artificial intelligence. This would horrify authors like Orwell or Asimov who, as creators of their works, would probably disdain such innovation as part of real life, but would have no problem portraying it as a catastrophe devised by a tyrannical alien—confident that no robot could ever replace the editor before the book reaches the bookstore shelf.

The New Humanities and Humanists

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Now as in the past, a real job is an activity that, in addition to providing you with an income, a savings account, and other benefits, allows you to put your professional knowledge and skills into practice and develop yourself in a particular field.

In a real job, an employee is hired based on a specific profile to take on specific responsibilities by performing specific tasks, and is by no means, “logically,” a multifunctional entity on which virtually every part of the company’s operations depends. Unfortunately, these days, the only ones with real jobs are business owners, because—at least in the working-class economy—a “executive manager” is also the one who sells a product, and cleans the entire store. Sometimes you need a master’s degree in business administration for that.

But even in this chaotic new work culture, some traditional and reputable companies still adhere to the old standards for hiring and assigning responsibilities. Furthermore, they continue to have a requirement that significantly reduces the number of applicants: the credit score.

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The Other Epistemology

Knowing When Time Is Running Out

Between 2019 and 2023, I accompanied around seventy American people through periods of acute crisis. Addiction, early pregnancies, clashes with parents, school dropping, heartbreaks, divorce, etc. I was neither a therapist nor a certified coach, and I never claimed to be. My work belonged somewhere else entirely.

Most of the time, that space consisted of interpreting archetypal images through the lens of the astrological art. A quiet dialogue with ambiguity. Clients gave me fragments: a birth date, a vague complaint, sometimes nothing but “what do you see.” I’d map archetypal images onto a life I couldn’t fully see, with no history and no timeline to anchor them to. Those readings were interpretations, intuitive architecture, and I knew it while I was making them. I want to be honest about the limits of the craft before I tell you about the one time it wasn’t a guess. The difference matters.

One client gave me everything. She was a psychologist in her thirties, and unlike most others she gave me her birth data, her parents’, her partner’s, and a full account of what had happened between them: dates, incidents, the shape of the deterioration. Her relationship had begun as difficult and turned, over roughly a year, into one marked by drug addiction, intimidation, and repeated physical violence. She knew, as a psychologist, that the outcome no longer depended on her willingness to help him, or on the therapist they had been seeing for months. She stayed anyway, convinced that leaving would mean abandoning someone who might still change. She contacted me because of my writing on Jungian psychology and astrology, where I’d spent a year arguing against the sentimental popularization of both disciplines and insisting they be treated as serious intellectual traditions.

“I’ve been reading you for a year. You’re different. You actually study,” she wrote, before laying out the case in the detail I’d asked for. What frightened me, once I had the charts in front of me, wasn’t what had already happened. It was what hadn’t happened yet. It read like listening to a countdown with maybe fifteen seconds left.

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About this article:

Most university students reach a point where they look at a course syllabus and quietly wonder what this is supposed to be for. I reach that point often. Sometimes the problem is the course itself: the material feels dated, abstract, or strangely untouched by the conditions people actually work under. Other times the disconnect comes from reading teachers in Mexico and the U.S. describe their daily practice and realizing that their reality barely overlaps with what I am being taught in my pedagogy program. When that gap becomes too obvious, frustration sets in, followed by the uncomfortable thought that my degree might be a joke that forgot to be funny.

Still, studying pedagogy is not casual for me. It is not a backup plan or a box to check. It is a life project, and very likely my last one, which means I take it seriously even when it disappoints me. That seriousness is exactly what makes the disappointments harder to ignore.

Whenever I use an AI assistant to explore a topic, I also weigh the course behind it. I ask whether it will actually help me work, survive, or stay relevant in education as it exists, not as it is described in policy documents. More than once, that process has led me to conclude that certain courses function mainly as filler. I do not believe knowledge is useless, and I know breadth matters, but it is also clear that not all subjects carry the same weight once you leave the classroom. Some shape how you think. Others shape whether you get hired or last more than a year.

So I asked several AI systems to evaluate my entire degree program. Forty-eight courses across eight semesters. I posed the same task to GPT, Gemini, and Claude, then read their assessments carefully, side by side. I asked all of them to drop the polite tone and speak the way an experienced teacher does in the staff room after years in overcrowded schools, tight budgets, and constant reform. Just honest. After weighing their responses, this one stood out. It was the clearest and the most aligned with how education actually functions on the ground.

If you are studying education in Mexico right now, consider this a preview of what you are about to be served.

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The mothers know it, the priest knows it, even the local wildlife knows it: Mexico did not need any corporate inclusive education, because in this country, even the most aggressive macho was, and still is, a puto (faggot) to his friends. Being gay here is about as ordinary as being a bastard—meaning, it applied to every single one of us. Entirely normal, entirely human, provided you don’t try to kiss your compadre without buying him a shot of tequila first.

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Parents know it, teachers know it, heaven knows it: there are physical conditions that require direct clinical attention. Fractures, infections, sensory impairments, injuries, neurological damage you can actually see and measure and point to. In these cases, the language we use tends to stay relatively honest, because the thing we are describing pushes back. It has edges. It resists interpretation.

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Two days ago, I received a (devastating) email from a 52-year-old Mexican woman who read my note on the student use of AI. Her name is Ana María. In 2024, she graduated with a degree in Pedagogy, her second bachelor’s degree. She is also a psychologist. Her message wasn’t about the AI; it was a violent reality check regarding a specific line I wrote about needing a credential just to get a real chance in the job market.

“You have no idea what you’ve walked into!” her email began. “If you are already at that age, nobody is going to hire you, even if you graduate with a perfect GPA,” she continues. “They will demand endless courses, and even if you take them, if you’re lucky enough to get hired, they will pay you practically nothing.”

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