Project Vision 21

You can’t help those who do not want to be helped and you can’t teach those who do not want to learn. Unfortunately for me, I learned those lessons late in life. In fact, I am just now learning them, so I mistakenly still believe that we should help the needy and educate those who need it. But, although it's hard for me to admit it, it's not like that anymore.

Only a few decades ago, when people attended an English as a Second Language class, they did it with the intention of learning that language, or that's what I thought. Nowadays, the "English class" has been transformed into a sort of hunting ground, in which each "student" doesn’t study English, but his or her "prey".

Far from paying attention to English (or finances, or nutrition, or whatever), they pay attention only to what they can sell to whom, or whom they can invite to an event, or how many "Likes" they can generate in that class.

Even worse -and it has recently happened to me a couple of times and I'm even ashamed to confess it-, there are those who come to the class knowing English, but pretend they don’t know it, only to blatantly steal the material and then take the students to "their" classes.

And those same people who don’t want to learn come to us with a long list of their problems and demand that we solve them. They don’t ask for help solving their problems. They want us to provide the complete solution, without them contributing anything for themselves or offering anything in return.

And there are also those who, pretending to teach, don’t do it. But nothing can be said to them because week after week they stand in front of hundreds and sometimes thousands of people, repeating the same thing over and over again, and receiving in return thunderous applauses from their admirers who neither understood nor paid attention to whatever they were told.

Recently, for example, I heard a "leader" (to give him a designation) "teaching" to a group of parents that they shouldn’t pay attention to new technologies and that "If technology becomes a problem, we should return to our countries." As if changing geography and going back to a nostalgically non-existent past were a solution.

And then there is the case of a person who, before hundreds of his followers (and I, by chance sitting among them), said that "things are so bad in today's world that the mortality rate among humans is almost 100 percent". I would have liked to ask him what he meant by "almost 100 percent mortality", but there was no opportunity to do it. 

In other words, is there any percentage, however tiny, of human who are not mortal? If this person has the answer, or if he is immortal, he could should it. But. in reality, it was pure charlatanism in search of a narcissistic applause.

Let each draw his or her own conclusions.