Today, May 30, 2014, José Luis González-Simancas Lacasa, pedagogue -as he liked to define himself-, teacher of teachers -as others called him-, professor -as his students called him- and main mentor of the programs of study of Education at the University of Navarra, passed away in Pamplona, after a long and quiet illness. Don José Luis was born in Madrid, on November 22, 1924, into a family of ten siblings, with a legal, humanist, pedagogical and business tradition. These were references that greatly marked his life and generated in him an educational, innovative and humanist restlessness that accompanied him for the rest of his days.

His life was above all pedagogical and university communication. He defined the former as "a passion for making what is mine yours and what is mine yours". A sign of identity that he learned from his parents and later consolidated as a numerary member of Opus Dei. A vocation, as he himself said, that marked his life of true horizons, and that his own life has been responsible for confirming by shaping in him a personality marked by a commendable peace, serenity and illusion of life. His second passion, the university, began in October 1942, in the Schools of Philosophy and Letters and Law. A double vocation that finally opted for History and more specifically for the History of America. An option that, according to him, was a foregone conclusion. He was familiarly a vital and restless Ciceronian, aware that history was an important part of the magisterium of life. A strong temptation that Professor Simancas - as many of his students called him - could hardly resist.

But Don José Luis was not a historian by profession. History served him to confirm the pedagogical value of human facts and his pedagogical vocation. Something he was able to confirm definitively in 1949, when he traveled to high school of Education of the University of London. His London years left an indelible mark on him. They helped him to understand Education as a practical knowledge and not to dissociate wisdom and life. A concern that he was able to teach pedagogically, from October 1951, when he began the adventure of high school of Gaztelueta in Bilbao. An exciting experience, one of the most important of his life - he pointed out on many occasions - which ended in 1965, when he moved to the University of Navarra to guide the future teachers of teaching average . Here he was a key player core topic in the founding and subsequent development of the high school of Sciences of the Education (1967), of the programs of study of Pedagogy (1973) and of the birth of Hospital Pedagogy at the University of Navarra, embryo of the European Association of Hospital Pedagogues (1988) of which he was a founding member.

In 1995, after forty-five years of intense dedication to Education, José Luis González-Simancas retired as Full Professor from the University of Navarra. A long period of teaching life, marked by a deep educational vocation, by a select pedagogical training , by a full integration of knowing how to do and living by doing, and by a teaching that made the human and spiritual growth of others his main reason for living. Thank you, master, for teaching us to grow, to hope and to feel what is human with hope.