The director general of La Salle Campus Barcelona - URL, Josep M. Santos, has inaugurated the academic year with the slogan “Imagine”, which will be the message for the 2019-2020 academic year for all institutions under the La Salle Catalonia umbrella.
To imagine is to learn to look at things differently, to look for solutions where no one has looked before, to put forward options that no one else has thought of, to anticipate problems and difficulties and offer new answers, to dream of a world different from the one we have now...
Imagination opens up new worlds, ideas, perceptions... Children enjoy imagining new things through games. Those of us who are not so young have fond memories of when we imagined we were policemen and -women chasing the "bad guys", doctors curing the sick or the stars of our favourite films. As well as connecting with our creative side, imagination motivates us to act, to move, to be protagonists. With this motto, we want to start a movement in the heart of everybody who makes up La Salle.
A movement that starts within us and spreads forth into the world. The Spanish dictionary has 4 entries for the verb “to imagine”:
- tr. To represent the image of something or someone in your mind: Imagine a field of flowers. I can’t imagine him as a father any more.
- tr. To assume something based on evidence. I imagine you’ll be staying for lunch.
- tr. To invent or create something. I’ve imagined a way to solve the problem.
- tr. To use fantasy to conceive of something.
Our focus is on the last two: inventing, creating and fantasising. This motto aims to encourage our students to develop the skills and competences that needed in the mindset of an inventor, a creator.
It is about entering the world of the creator and the inventor, and to learn to look at things differently, to look for solutions where no one has looked before, to put forward options that no one else has thought of, to anticipate problems and difficulties and offer new answers, to dream of a world different from the one we have now... The word "imagine" evokes all this and more.
The idea associated with this slogan is reflected in the way we will present and work on the poster during the 2019-2020 academic year. We want the poster to apply throughout the year.
LASALLIAN THROUGHOUT HISTORY
Saint John Baptist de la Salle knew how to project this value all throughout his life and in each and every one of the initiatives he set in motion:
- He organised schools open to all social classes
- He founded an institution with a vocation for progress and universality
- He wrote learned, varied books, with innovative ideas
- He sowed seeds of concern and commitment that lasted far beyond his death
- He lent his name to a movement that is still alive in the world today
- Even his pedagogical and spiritual works testify to the fact that he was able to be creative.
Only at the end of his journey, looking back, did he really realise that an Institute of Christian educators had been born. He looked back and saw that he had written two dozen books for these educators and for the schoolchildren. He also understood that it was something new and dynamic, and asked those who had followed him not to be afraid, since the educational need was both great and urgent.
La Salle “imagined” a new school where education was based on the fraternity of the brothers who lived together and shared everything. Until then, the school project had been local and individual; a school that educated in the faith that underlined the meaning of life for many people, as opposed to a school that only fixated on the prestige and intellectual level they could provide to the elites, and a school at the service of the neediest among us. A school where the poor sat next to the affluent, creating links of justice between them against a school of the elite who sought only the money of those who could pay.
Today it is up to us to make this value behind our educational communities a reality. In creativity, we can show our true character.