IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION B

Abstract

This article examines the school as a “locus sacer”—a sacred space in the Eliadean sense—within the changing conditions of contemporary society. Drawing on Mircea Eliade’s distinction between the sacred and the profane, it argues that the school constitutes a unique point of convergence where profoundly different social, cultural, and existential realities are brought into relation. In a fragmented and rapidly transforming world, the school remains one of the few spaces in which a shared symbolic order can still be experienced. Through a historical-philosophical perspective, the article traces the evolution of the school from its Ancient Greek, Medieval and early modern forms to the present. While educational structures, technologies, and curricula have undergone radical transformations, a deeper continuity persists. The school has always functioned as a space of separation and initiation—a kind of medieval “sagrera”—in which ordinary social distinctions are temporarily suspended, and a form of civic and human fraternity becomes possible. Precisely at moments of profound social change, the article argues, the school must safeguard what has always defined it. Its vocation is not exhausted by efficiency, employability, or the transmission of information. Rather, its enduring task is to preserve a space in which the inefable dimensions of human formation—time, attention, memory, shared presence, and symbolic meaning—can be encountered. In this sense, the sacred character of the school is not an archaic residue but a necessary condition for genuine education. By interpreting schooling through the lens of the sacred, the article proposes that education is not merely a process of knowledge transmission or social reproduction, but also an encounter with the ineffable dimensions of human formation—time, memory, fraternity, and transcendence.