By Lida Prypchan
The most recent generations of students and teachers have run into a serious problem; given the educational explosion parallel to the demographic growth of the population, classrooms worldwide face a common spectacle: student overcrowding, a shortage of teachers and insufficient time to cover all the materials needed for professional training.
The educational explosion is a consequence of the progressive increase of the population that brings with it the impersonal and an indifference to all others, which is to say the attitude of “go about your own business and don’t get involved in the affairs of anyone.” This leads us to interact with a small group of people as if the rest of the world does not exist. Transferring this phenomenon to the school environment, we can understand that, along with the increase of school population, appears divisions and desires to return to “the good old days.”
It is seen in political parties, scientific organizations and even in the cities. An institution that grows passes through its crises. Some of these crises are fatal for the institution and for the individuals belonging to it.
Researchers from the most diverse disciplines say that the confinement of students in classrooms where there is no physical space causes aggressive reactions that are frequently directed against the premises of the institution.
Aggressive reactions such as the destruction of important works of art in some universities, the use of their walls as spaces for partisan propaganda, the destruction of valuable teaching materials, and the theft of objects and books belonging to such institutions.
Some researchers performed interviews with students on the subject and reported with a convincing solemnity: “We find ourselves in an unjust society where a form of emotional release is to give free rein to the tensions of our accumulated aggression. It will continue to happen until there is a more just society. “
Given all this, I wonder why do they not release their aggression by creating a cultural center, which the university still lacks, or by getting involved in sports or promoting them among their friends or just dedicating themselves to studying, since that is the least they should be doing. They waste their time and drag along others in order that they waste it as well. There is a rush to graduation, but they ruin their futures by spending their time without goals or interests.
No school of psychology can overlook that what ails our youth is a vast idleness. One cannot offer as an excuse that the educational explosion generates so many malicious manifestations only in Venezuelan students since all of the students in the world suffer through the same tensions, and yet one does not see what one sees in Venezuela. Here it seems like no one can put a brake on their destructive impulses. Unfortunately, in Venezuela destroying the national patrimony does not entail punishment.
To my knowledge, no socialist university, such as the Cuban or Soviet, maintains these attitudes which allow students leave to destroy something at the university. Rather the opposite. Neither does this happens in capitalist universities such as in the US, Brazil, Mexico, etc. …
In conclusion, overpopulation carries as a consequence, among other things, a large educational deficit. As is expected, with an increase in the population, education will be even more deficient than it is.
Some advocate as a solution the de-dollarization of society with freer teaching methods. Propositions for open universities and education through correspondence and television probably will attempt to cover some part of the tremendous educational deficit.
As for the outpouring of misdirected aggression of students who see themselves as victims of an unjust society, it will be necessary to educate them to be more civilized and expend their excess energy and hyperactivity in other forms, but productive forms for themselves and for the unjust society that they will not be able to change.
