Educating

for friendship
Could the practice of friendship, repair some of the fragility we see today in citizen behavior?
Germn Gmez Veas

ABSTRACT
It seems appropriate that schools could assume, with greater intensity, the challenge of installing the eduction of friendship as a primary objective, to achieve the purpose of giving effect to the value of citizenship.

Educating for friendship

For our students to achieve a more human perspective in the configuration of their vital horizons, capable of acquiring easily the interest of being better persons in building a society where freedom and the respect and the common well being prevails, I believe principals and teachers should incorporate as parto f the curriculum, friendship as the articulation point of the values they teach. Since ancient times, philosophers have seen that friendship is a virtue that enables people to be happy and lead a constructive life for themselves and also to positively transform the communities in which they engage. So understood Aristotle, who dedicated in his Ethics important chapters to explaining why friendship is a moral virtue fundamental to life. With a more focused approach to human psychological progress, Cicero put the accent on the premise that friendship can consolidate personal identity, noting that on the basis of dialogue with friends, each person will consolidate the ethical virtues, insisting that "we are not born for ourselves, but a part of our birth we owe to our country, the other to our parents, and other to our friends". Probably these were some of the considerations that led Kant to say that true friendship should be elevated to the status of an inescapable moral duty, independent of the will itself, and therefore, would distinguish the person in its highest human condition. What philosophers have described again and again as properties of the friendship, is the core of citizenship, and today, perhaps as never before in our history, it seems necessary to implement it. From this basis, we think, must be revitalized so from its inception was the pedagogical mission, namely the formation of citizens with a strong character that drives the seeking personal fulfillment, that same commitment, a commitment with the common quest for fulfillment Could the practice of friendship, repair some of the fragility we see today in citizen behavior?

Germn Gmez Veas

C o n su lta n t in e d u c a tio n a n d c o lle g e p ro fe s s o r, a u th o r o f th e te x ts W h a t is e th ic s? a n d , E d u c a tio n fo r C itize n sh ip