The path of Sarmiento and Borges

A future riddled with uncertainty places scientific and technological development and transformative ideas at the forefront and imperatively demands that the State strategically prioritize education and culture.

Will Argentina intelligently embrace that challenge? It is known: we are bad and we are getting worse; education is one of the most worrying faces of decadence; the system demands a revolution from its bases.

Long canes and short ideas. The brain drain caused by the ""onganiato"" acts as a starting bell for obscurantism and devastation. Although the previous accumulation made its power still felt, the long night decreed by the Dictatorship crowns that policy: plunge the country into darkness. Then, with democracy you don't educate; the return to “normality” only turns on dim lights that yield to the dominant tendency towards the decomposition of the State and avoiding essential ruptures generates an implacable dynamic.

In the 19th century, Sarmiento, and in the following Borges, are inescapable referents of a cultural past that makes us proud even though they resonate, increasingly, with nostalgic reminiscences; beyond vain debates, both illuminate. The question is: will the 21st century incubate figures of this stature? The reservations are logical: the social environment is not the most lavish.

Let's avoid stereotypes. Borges and Sarmiento coincide, for example, as people of excellent humor; they idolize their respective mothers; they cultivate early readings in French; they are agnostic and anticlerical and display austerity and disdain for ostentation. Their disabilities – one, deaf, the other, blind – enhance other acuities, such as inexhaustible curiosity and memory, in both, admirable. Why then freeze their images on the "father of the classroom" or the supreme storyteller? Welcome to the “poetic” beings marked by creativity!

Austerity is an unavoidable issue; Let's encrypt clues in two letters from 1874: “I'm sending you some books for prizes or whatever you want –she writes to a niece in San Juan–, and I'll send you more if they don't cost such enormous sums to send them. Yesterday they presented me with bills for 90 strong pesos for three that I have sent before”.

Uncle Domingo pays the shipping out of his pocket. To his grandson in Paris: “Try to get a job. Balcarce told me to appoint you as a secondee to the Embassy. He ignores the poor man that nepotism is a Popes vice. The appointment to a position rented by the Nation for the benefit of his grandson will never bear the signature of Domingo F. Sarmiento”. Who signs is… the president of the nation.

Memorable pasts that invite a stride: "Do you understand the present tense?" Borges asks. "I do not. Perhaps it is easier to understand past times. The present is something that surrounds us, oppresses us, confuses us. I do not understand the present: I feel perplexed, there are times when I feel sad, I feel a sense of nightmare before certain things that happen. Well, the fact that I'm famous is already proof of how strange the present is."

The best humor is the ability to laugh at oneself and that genius is also identified by the self-taught bias. But their prestige is different. The man from San Juan "enjoys" a "high position that only gives me being the target of anger, jealousy or animosity, without the advantages of power, not even a comfortable situation, making such suffering bearable." His burial, however, becomes an apotheosis and says goodbye to "the most powerful brain America has ever produced."

The reader Borges defines: “In an incompatible heteroclite world of provincials, orientals and porteños, Sarmiento is the first Argentine, the man without local limitations”, he is cosmopolitan, American, universal. With a caustic tone, he addresses an old lawsuit with “Martín Fierro”: “I will not say that Facundo is the first Argentine book; categorical affirmations are not ways of conviction but of controversy. I will say that if we had canonized it as our exemplary book, another would be our story and better.

And he affirms it as "his friend of his": "No one can read Memorias de Provincia without professing for the brave dead man who wrote it, a feeling that goes beyond veneration and admiration: full and indulgent friendship." Sarmiento values ​​his legacy: "I have carved my crude cocoon, like caterpillars, and without becoming a butterfly, I will survive to see that the thread I laid down will be used by those who follow me." The invisible threads cross the century and Borges weaves with them with a fraternal spirit: it is the community of freethinkers who "are not overwhelmed by marble or glory."

“There is a way to be happy and that is not to believe that you are the most miserable”, accepts a resigned Sarmiento; a character from Borges, on the other hand, emphasizes by way of a mandate: “Every man's duties are incumbent on you: to be just and happy”, and admits, however, that his worst sin is that he was not. Tinted with a certain skepticism, they allow themselves some self-confidence: “I have faith, sir.