Carolina Domínguez

How to Address the Crisis in Education:
LaRouche in the Universities

Carolina Domínguez is a leader of the Schiller Institute in Mexico. She has been working to expand the access of young people to the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, in part, by getting LaRouche and his outlook into the curricula at universities. Her presentation was delivered in Spanish, with simultaneous interpretation, to the first panel, “Reversing the Cultural Wasteland—The Urgency of a New Renaissance, Creating a Planetary Culture Worthy of the Dignity of Humanity,” of the March 20-21 Schiller Institute Conference, “World at a Crossroad—Two Months into the Biden Administration.”

Good morning. I’m Carolina Domínguez of the Schiller Institute in Mexico. I’m very happy to be at this conference, and I welcome you to it.

I would like to begin my presentation by reading a few excerpts from our campaign initiative, “LaRouche in the Universities,” which we launched last month. I would ask you to please read the full document, and to sign it if you agree to join this campaign. Please leave us your contact information to be able to get back in touch with you, to dialogue further about it. And please forward it to other people who might be interested.

[Domínguez reads from the document, “LaRouche in the Universities—An Example of True Agapē: What Really Is Power?”]

We, youth from around the world and members of the international Schiller Institute, have posed the question as to whether we are really doing the right thing in terms of the academic and moral education of so many of the planet’s youth. In replying, we discover the paradox that if we were doing the right thing, the grave international systemic crisis we face wouldn’t exist.

What we instill in the minds and hearts of our youth through their education, will give them the tools to decide what they will do with their lives, taking up the mission of a “commitment to society” to improve our universe. With the method Lyndon LaRouche’s ideas represent, the word “commitment” won’t frighten them. They will see in it the realization of their ideals, as they better themselves and consequently seek the improvement and benefit of their fellow man….

This is our petition:

That we begin education and training in the method developed by Lyndon LaRouche, through courses, workshops, seminars, graduate courses, conferences, contests, experiments, science and art fairs—to take place in academies, universities, forums, courses and classes…

We are not demanding. We are offering the opportunity to give young people what belongs to them by natural law. That is, to create an inflection point in history—an option that differs from the pessimism they breathe.

That’s an excerpt from our initiative, which we would like you to use. Through this presentation, I want to let those of you attending this conference know that we are working through the original writings of authors who have transformed our society. That’s the heart of LaRouche’s method: the discovery of universal principles and ideas that can shape history. If you look at our petition more closely, you will see photographs of the work that we have been doing during this period. In the workshops or classes that we’ve organized, we’re getting youth to make discoveries for themselves. Because LaRouche, Kepler, Leonardo da Vinci, the Greeks did that, and we have to do it as well.

If you look at Leonardo’s sketches, after having gone through the Schiller Institute’s geometry workshops, for example, you will see drawings of the five Platonic solids. These are the five regular solids that can be constructed: for example, the octahedron, which is the one I have here. As you can see, all of the sides are identical. Or for example, the tetrahedron, which is this one.

By engaging in construction and working through the characteristics of each one of the solids, we find that we need to look at Luca Pacioli’s book, The Divine Proportion. The sketches in Luca Pacioli’s book were drawn by Leonardo da Vinci. If you go back and look at those sketches after having gone through one of the Schiller Institute’s workshops, you’ll see that they are very similar. I’m not saying that we are Leonardo da Vinci; but I am saying that this is the path. This is the path that allows us to understand the mind, the intention of those authors.

‘A Tattoo for the Soul’

This process, when you are working through books such as Johannes Kepler’s Mysterium Cosmographicum (Secrets of the Universe), or these solids, you start to feel more capable. You start to feel happy because it becomes something that is yours, something that nobody can take from you, because it’s yours. It becomes almost like a tattoo for the soul.

The experience of discovery, as LaRouche said, gives you real freedom, it gives you power, the power of ideas. The power to discover for yourself, to have your own judgment.

But it doesn’t end there. When you are able to help another person make the same discovery that you made, or a discovery of Kepler’s, or Leonardo’s, but with his own process, you realize that there is a connection between your minds. That is agapē. That is to educate, to guide. That is the power of ideas. It is what we do in the school which Lyndon LaRouche left us. And it is the dynamic that we want to achieve in the universities. Because it generates a Socratic dialogue of profound ideas, an exchange of hypotheses not only about the discovery which has been made, but also about the application of that discovery for the welfare of the population; the changes in the dynamic that the incorporation of that new discovery has brought about; and the new paradoxes that it generates.

You will find that this leads to a change in the way the student thinks. We don’t make them memorize concepts they don’t understand, and which only feed into the fragility of their thinking, or if they do generate it, they think that they can’t change anything. They only have spasms of thinking that they might be successful, but they won’t achieve the quality of leadership that is needed to change history.

On the contrary, we have to make them part of the living process, of a social process. That kind of working together and dynamic will lead to a level of collaboration you never see in the classrooms today.

The universities will then demonstrate the level of commitment that a group of citizens can have towards their nations. This is an example of what our political leaders can achieve on all levels. This will be the true education of youth and leaders. This is what we are doing with the campaign to bring LaRouche to the universities, working with different professors around the world to have every student participate—to have every youth on this planet participate in this process. Not as a multiple-choice test which doesn’t reflect anything at all about their ability, but does make it possible to reject them.

Instead, we will generate a process of transformation, such that the students master the principle of the discovery of principles that can be applied for the welfare of the population.

Throughout this conference you are going to hear presentations with proposals our movement is making: energy systems, health systems, systems for the standard of living of our population to improve. This is the campaign of LaRouche in the universities as an example of true agapē. And we are inviting every professor, every person who is in touch with youth, every youth, whether you are in college or not. We want this to become a real dynamic, a living dynamic. This is what I’m inviting you to join, to participate in this process. And the first benefit is for you: the power to have your own true judgment. Thank you.