Today ' s words
A cut not just to hair, but to freedom.
Isabella Mantilla Carreño. 9C
A few weeks ago, after the designation of a new Minister of Education, the government of El Salvador prohibited students from wearing certain types of hairstyles, under the excuse that it promotes discipline and uniformity. According to national sources, this plan intends to“ prevent schools from becoming gang recruitment centers,” but in reality, these measures go against young people’ s right to personal identity, and if anyone tries to go against them by going with a different haircut, they aren’ t allowed to enter the school, which results in another violation of human rights, denying education to a minor.
For many people adopting a certain hairstyle it’ s not just an affair of aesthetics, it’ s their identity. The ways they adopt their hair are representations of their thoughts, their culture, or any idea they want to expose, and it should be respected by everyone, not rejected by power institutions. Instead of promoting an education based on tolerance and diversity, El Salvador is filling their new generations with ideas that support conformity, instead of turning schools into places where people can be their selves and creative, these impositions torn apart these beautiful principles.
Furthermore, it’ s ridiculous to say that hair interferes with learning. There is not any real data that supports this claim, but this idea only brings more stereotypes and discrimination, which is shown to affect academic performance. The real problems affecting younger generations’ studies are access to resources, effort, and the quality of education. It doesn’ t matter if someone has green hair; this doesn’ t define them. They could even be the best student in the whole country, but because of this retrograde thinking, it will just result in a wave of denotations against them. This shows how contradictory these rules are: rather than making positive changes, they are causing a major setback for society, wasting resources and time that could be really used for real problems in the school system.
If people can’ t make their own small decisions about their bodies, what do we expect them to do when they fully join the community? What guarantees do we have that this generation will grow into fully autonomous individuals and not just obedient citizens? These are the kinds of problems that these crazy laws bring with them. By taking away small pieces of a person’ s liberty, they become more susceptible to manipulation, leading to the loss of our identity as responsible human beings.
In conclusion, this prohibition in El Salvador is meaningless, vain, and harmful. The state shouldn’ t focus on these fake problems; its real concern must be guiding newer generations toward respect, responsibility, and the embracement of diversity. The world didn’ t go through atrocities only to finally agree on principles for all human beings, just for the whim of a leader and their followers to discard them.
The Reason of the Science
David Cárdenas. 10B
Nowadays, the persistent evolution of science is constantly bringing new research and studies one more innovative than the previous one. Things like quantum computation or even the discovery of a new particle or element are some of the most evident cases in the last decade. But with this innovation comes a question that sometimes can be quite concerning: is this useful?. This question has every right to be asked; after all, one purpose of science, if not the most important, is to help the world by providing new tools that can benefit society in some way that it finds useful. Then, we should expect that the answer to that question should be a yes most of the
time, right?. Well, this is not always true. In fact, a lot of these findings apparently have no use whatsoever. For example, the detection of particles that were theoretical and are proven real sounds like an incredible success, but knowing that a thing exists doesn’ t change at first the world that we live in. America was there before the Spanish arrived. Nevertheless, there is a reason for this: science works in a way that it first discovers and then applies. The first can be done from past studies that had problems left open. But actually getting to develop an application is a task that can be even bigger than the previous one. Despite this, history has proved that this isn’ t an
11 impossible goal. When X-rays were first seen, it was thought to be just a rare phenomenon, nothing useful. Now, they save countless human lives in hospitals. Everyday scientists are doing research in things that don’ t seem pretty important for society and don’ t have utilities at all, however this is only a part of the journey that leads to big achievements. The smaller things could be insignificant today, but in the future they may change the world.