Readings: Paco Yunque

In just twenty pages the great Peruvian writer and poet César Vallejo manages to bring the reader closer to the experiences of a country boy who arrives at that strange place where children are locked in a room, in front of a blackboard, with tall windows to avoid distraction and to ensure, many believe, learning.

"Paco was also muddle-headed because in the countryside he never heard so many voices of people at once. In the country people spoke first one, then another, then another and then another."

How much that place can deafen the children who were born and grew up in front of the mountain, planting the farm, playing around the trees or taking care of the guinea pigs, the hens, the sheep; looking at the clouds, feeling and taking care of the springs.

How much desolation children can feel when they are subjected to ridicule and abuse by others of their age, who are children of the rich, the landowners, the powerful or the abusive city dwellers.

"Yunque does not say anything, sir, because Humberto Grieve hits him, because he's his boy and he lives in his house."

And it is necessary to be outraged by the abuses, injustices and exclusions. Because nobody is more than anyone and the school could not and should not be that place where mockery and fear are everywhere.

The school should not be a place of seclusion and invisibility of the most humble, the most kind, the most dignified. The school, more than being the countryside itself, must be born of it: to learn from and with Nature, the first teacher we all have.