As soon as I was born, my grandpa Beto put a Boca jersey on me.
In my family, we all root for Boca.
My uncles, Aitor, the Dude, they would tell me glorious stories
about the best football team in Argentina.
Well, actually, in the whole world.
They especially loved telling me
about matches we had won to our archrival.
And on Sundays, we got together for a barbecue.
Sometimes my grandmother cooked gnocchi.
The food varied,
but what never changed was that in the afternoons, we all got together
to listen to the game on the radio.
One day, when I grew up, my dad took me to the stadium.
The mythical 'Bombonera'.
Oh, I will never forget!
That's how my family would pass on to me
a sense of belonging to a community,
which I later passed on to my children.
We're from Boca and Boca is our team.
This isn't much different from what I lived at school.
From what all schools do to promote national identity.
We used symbols like the flag, the anthem,
we would share great stories and tales
about how unique and unrepeatable our country is.
We have rituals, some national heroes and even rivals.
No one is born biologically Japanese, Venezuelan or Mexican.
We need others to approach us
and show us what it's like to be a part of,
to feel part of a community like our nation.
That way, we can think that patriotism
is the result of a huge effort
made from generation to generation
to keep us together.
To enable this living together in a territory we call our own
which we have respect for, and we feel responsible for.
The good news is that
if patriotism is a construction that we created all together
we might also think that we can go one step further.
And that's what I do in my work:
To think about how we can train people
who learn to live together and collaborate globally.
No one wants to stop loving their homeland or stop defending it, of course,
but I do think we can rethink some of the ways
in which we learn to live with others.
Evelin was my student in college.
She's a 'porteña', as we call the people from the City of Buenos Aires.
She speaks porteño. She says 'che', 'pibe', 'boludo'.
His parents are Korean.
She did her thesis with me about Korean immigrants in Argentina.
She told me that when she goes to a café in the city of Buenos Aires,
she sits down, and the waiters usually speak to her in English.
And they're surprised when she replies back in her perfect porteño.
I recently learned also about the story of María Magdalena Lamadrid.
María Magdalena is the president of the Africa Vive Foundation,
which is dedicated to making visible
the presence of Afro-descendants in Argentina.
To make it visible because popular knowledge
and some of the stories they tell us wrongly indicate
that in Argentina there are no people of African origin.
It's a mistake. It's not like that.
And something terrible happened to María Magdalena once.
She arrives at the airport to travel,
She was going to a convention representing Argentinean Afro-descendants,
I think it was in Panama,
And when she reaches the airport in Buenos Aires
she is stopped by immigration police
who takes away her passport and tells her it's fake.
It seems that to the eyes of these cops
there was no way there could exist a person like María Magdalena
who is black and Argentinean.
Today it doesn't matter much where we live.
We're in constant contact with other cultures.
And if I meet someone from Japan or India,
I'm sure the differences will call my attention.
But, don't we also have a lot in common?
There's a movie, Letters from Iwo Jima,
in which there a scene that makes me think a lot about this.
I will share it with you, it goes like this:
There's a group of Japanese soldiers who are in a cave, on an island,
defending against a U.S. attack during the Second World War.
And they have a prisoner.
The prisoner dies with a piece of paper in his hand.
And right away they start to wonder if that would be the enemy's plans.
And they ask one who knows English to read aloud.
But no, it wasn't the enemy's plans.
It was a letter.
A letter from his mother telling him that she loves him, she misses him,
that she hopes the war will end soon.
And she'd tell him stories about the farm and the town where they lived.
One by one, as they listen to the reading,
Japanese soldiers begin to get on their feet
and take off their helmets to honor him.
That letter was identical
to the letters they received from their mothers.
That letter turned an enemy into a fellow man.
And those soldiers couldn't fight anymore.
Think about how much violence is generated in the world
because we focus on differences.
In religion, in nationality, skin color.
Humans as a species face enormous challenges.
The climate crisis,
the global growth of inequalities, pandemics.
And also the challenge to live together with those who are different.
A world, a future, awaits for us plagued by ethical decisions
we will have to take as a species.
And we will only be able to do it properly if we collaborate.
That's why I believe it is key
that in schools we go beyond soccer rivalry.
Beyond the 'Boca-River'.
Today, education policies
focus a lot on the importance
that students learn math, language, science.
And that's okay, of course. They have to do it.
But it's not enough.
I think we need a school
that teaches us how to live together and to collaborate,
with those who are different.
Those who think differently.
And a good way to start doing that
is to start by realizing
that our students are already citizens
who make ethical decisions every day in a hyper connected world.
I think it would be great if we could use those experiences
as a starting point to offer these students,
our students,
a really practical ethical education.
An ethical education to serve as a guide
for everyday decision-making.
We can start with something simple and even trivial
like thinking about the clothes we wear.
Why do we choose the clothes we chose?
How are our tastes set up?
Are they really ours?
What do they symbolize and which tribe they make us belong to?
Then we could ask ourselves about how these clothes are produced
and how those production ways interact with global warming
or with the growth of inequalities.
And so our students could debate and talk
about interdependence in the world.
About how our actions, even those simple actions
like the clothes we chose to wear,
can have an impact in people far away,
and in other living beings, and on Earth as an ecosystem.
And if our actions have an impact on others
that brings a moral responsibility to it.
We have to suggest in schools debates about that responsibility.
And we are probably going to find students
who have very different and opposed views,
and even very heated debates.
Great!
It would be a spectacular moment to be able to develop a skill
that I think is key to live together on a global scale.
The ability to genuinely discuss with others, with those different to us,
with those who think differently.
Not necessarily to try to convince them.
Neither to necessary agree.
It's enough for us to make an effort to try to understand them.
Understand why they think the way they think.
And why they defend the values and ideas they advocate for.
Do we really need to all agree in order to live together?
I don't think so.
The goal then is not training people all over the world
to have exactly the same values.
I invite you to think if we can design an education
that trains people who keep loving their homeland
and still, see all humans as their brothers and sisters.
And planet Earth as a shared house
we all have to take care of.
And if it works out, I'm not saying we would have a conflict-free world.
Of course not.
But maybe we could live together more harmoniously
not just on a global scale,
but also in our homeland.