In 1978 Alexander Solzhenitsyn was invited by Harvard University to give the inaugural lecture for that academic year. We professors love to think that everything begins when we start the course, because our calendars are different from the rest of the world. The same thing happens to politicians: when a legislature is solemnly inaugurated, it gives the impression that everything is possible; it seems that everything that is not working now has a chance to improve. Then the months go by and the promises are diluted like an effervescent tablet in a glass of water, which sizzles a lot, but then comes to nothing.

In the Russian writer's lecture, degree scroll A World in Pieces, there is a diagnosis of our world that, despite the fact that almost fifty years have passed, is still valid in some of its approaches. Our times of globalization want to bury the fact that what we call the First World, which represents the triumph of Western society due to its independence and its political, financial and military power, has been deployed at the expense of others. There is nothing worse for a human being than the blindness of superiority. While what we call economic growth marks the pulse of every day, we continue to exercise a radical misunderstanding of the essence of what is human.

Why is it that almost nobody dares to call things by their name? Why is it that people prefer to win rather than to convince? Why is it that the critical capacity of citizens is underestimated and those who have the sovereignty to decide about their present and their future are anesthetized? Until we do not take our ideas and beliefs to the public place , we will live subjected to those who prefer our depression to our joy, we will be chained to ideologies and not to good ideas, we will be prisoners of our comforts and not liberated by our ideals.

The welfare state is a mantra that we must examine carefully, because are we no longer affected as human beings when our neighbors have problems making ends meet, are we not concerned that if we confess our faith someone will put us on a list crueler than those of delinquency, have we given up wanting to build a more just society together? Technological progress is real progress if it opens paths towards the free and integral development of people, and this begins, first of all in the Education, in the good Education.