Eduardo Margareto

All my life, I have depended on people. As children, our families take care of us—in my case, two responsible teachers and a sister. At sixteen, I was leading the Calasanz scout group.

My wife and I built a family, we have three wonderful daughters, and we are part of the Santiago Uno ecosocial school project.

Those of us who dream of changing some of the world’s injustices have always done so with friends. For over thirty years, we have been building, as a team, an ecosystem of inclusion for vulnerable youth and children, migrants, and various marginalized groups. We have twelve homes and more than eight hundred students each year who, through alternative vocational training, commit to rescuing over a thousand birds of prey annually, reviving lost trades in Spain’s depopulated areas, producing five hundred kilos of honey, ten thousand kilos of cheese, five hundred kilos of olive oil, three thousand kilos of wine, reforesting, cooking, gardening, bioconstructing, and much more.

We have a circus school, a film school, a sports club, social enterprises, and a cooperative project in Morocco where, during the summer, we renovate schools and collaborate with a medical dispensary, a community kitchen, the construction of a sports court, and wells powered by solar panels.

Reflection begins with action. Our therapeutic intervention with minors follows a systemic, constructivist, and solution-focused model. Our main educational guides are Paulo Freire, with his liberating school, and Lorenzo Milani, with his class-based school that fights for the most disadvantaged.

We are in a school where we are all learners. We take in children who return from their hours in the traditional school system more dead than alive.

As a society, we learn many things, yet we fail to learn how to live. We maintain deadly borders, from which children arrive—like a pregnant Ukrainian girl from a bombed orphanage, a victim of suicide attempts; or children from peripheral neighborhoods, from migrant boats, from homes marked by domestic violence.

A society that turns into a dumping ground is one where support structures have collapsed. Education is this act of welcoming and creating livable environments. It’s not about romanticizing extreme hardship but about deepening our gaze and our understanding. If teachers are ignored, they may end up as social workers for the poor or life coaches for the wealthy.

A true teacher does not say, “Do as I do,” but rather, “Do it with me.” Teaching and learning mean developing capabilities we do not yet possess.

Education is an invitation to think beyond what we could conceive on our own. I believe that to generate solutions, we must be cultural and intergenerational hybrids, interacting beyond our own bubbles. Nietzsche said that the mark of true freedom is not being ashamed of oneself. If an entire nation felt ashamed, it would be like a lion about to leap.

We should feel ashamed of creating discarded lives—existences that merely survive, day by day, among the mountains of waste produced by the wealthy world. Wasted lives, with minds devastated since childhood.

Meanwhile, as this happens, the privileged—internalizing societal norms, as Nietzsche described in On the Genealogy of Morals—believe themselves sovereign in their own conscience. But conscience is the final frontier of science.

Kant said that as long as you can pay, there is no need to think. “Reason all you like, but do not stop obeying.” We need a liberating school where each individual can resonate with the events of the world, seeing faces rather than external tutors on social media. We cannot allow ourselves to be fitted with cultural prosthetics. Academic titles are becoming the new aristocracy.

Education must foster intelligence capable of solving problems in a constantly changing world. For that, students must understand, every single minute, why they are studying—and it must serve them in life.

Jesús Garrote / “Talentos con Acento”

Jesús Garrote (Moralina de Sayago, Zamora, 1967) is the director of Casa Escuela Santiago Uno,

an educational project so ambitious, multidisciplinary, and admirable that the two words used to describe it—ecosocial—don’t do it justice. Garrote doesn’t hesitate to admit that his place in the world is at this center in Salamanca.

Together with the other educators and young people, they form the “Santiaguera family.” They’re not a start-up, but they are disruptive. They don’t work with artificial intelligence, but with emotions. They don’t trade on the stock market, but their values save lives. They are social and educational innovation. They are people on the margins of the system. They are minorities. They are heroes. They are adolescents. They are the protagonists of lives that could easily be Netflix series.

Jesus Garrote’s vocation for helping minors outside the system is so absolute that neither illness nor literally putting his life at risk stop him from giving everything for the most disadvantaged. In this teaser for a documentary that is still on hold, you can get to know Jesus Garrote better. We hope that one day we can create a film with his Escuela UNOcine. Because yes, Casa Escuela Santiago Uno also promotes a film school. And a circus school. And it recovers birds. And makes cheese. And harvests wine. And countless other activities, all with one goal: to recover tenderness.