I would like to congratulate the Public University of Navarra (I don't like the acrostic) for the Gold Medal of Navarra, and to point out with it the bet that Navarra made in its day for the Education and culture as a way to conquer the future.

Today, when deciding on investments in culture, it seems that the public authorities consider it as a "luxury" sector of a handful of privileged idle people that can be eliminated without consequences, but if today more than ever our society must be creative, innovative and enterprising, it will be necessary to invest in culture as much as in other productive sectors, because without it the others will be impossible.

Authors like Koestler, Huizinga, Bergson, Freud demonstrate with their work that to be creative, it is necessary to be educated, to handle many elements, the more the better, to have well filled the "warehouses of the mind".

 training and experience are definitive when it comes to innovation, along with the work effort to make ideas valuable realities. But a person's life is too little by itself to accumulate all the necessary data to produce unique creative effects, so culture is needed to fill our "warehouses of the mind". Through culture we accumulate the experience of all humanity as a whole.

Through theater, music, painting, literature or dance, we learn concepts such as rhythm, harmony, geometry, human reactions, beauty, human passions, stories already lived, danger, the outcome of various situations, the effects of hatred, the strength of the human race, its capacity for evil....

Through culture we learn everything that we would not be able to learn in a lifetime by our own experience and that we have the opportunity to learn through all the men who have preceded us and have left their teaching for us. It is like a search engine of experiences. A Google made flesh.

It is only by being educated that our knowledge expands to allow us to be innovative and creative. One only invents from what one knows. Culture is not an ornament, it is an imperious necessity today more than ever.

If we work to be a reference of culture, we will stand out in the rest. Does anyone know a miserable cultured people? Or even a successful ignorant one? The success of many ignorant people leads to situations similar to the one we find ourselves in. The contempt of the educated always presages disaster.

It is possible that the lack of leadership that we suffer from has to do with the loss of value given to the cultural as opposed to the economic. In passing, I would like to propose that the Public University of Navarre choose a person from Navarre to give it its name. I propose Fray Pedro Malón de Echaide, who, in addition to being cultured, allows me to promote his city, which is my own, Cascante; the one that roots me to my land, my people and my culture.