RENOVATION                  11

in which it allows a limitless freedom all the time.

Such are the main works realized by this immaculate worker of intelligence and that constitute an intellectual monument sufficient to lay the foundation for an enviable scientific reputation.

Berra died on March 13, 1906 in this capital, his death mourned by all the cultured spirits of teaching, as in Argentina that in the Eastern Republic of Uruguay where, in the shadow of the illustrious José Pedro Varela, (the Uruguayan Sarmiento) began in his didactical works.

We wished to pay him our equitable homage on the eighth anniversary of his death, but because of the slow appearance of this magazine, we cannot use this opportunity.

But, is not always timely to give equitable tribute to superior men?

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The Confederation of Education

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Journalistic chronicles have opportunely made these assemblies of delegates for the associations of teachers and friends of education who preceded the constitution of the National Confederation of Education.

This saves us the task of making a chronicle of this important and entirely new subject in the history of the union. The fact is that a new unionized force stands for the defense of the teachers’ ideals, without which theoretical ideals of teaching would be purely metaphysical. It is true that all the nation’s teachers organized to constitute the next republic of education, their aim to be the proprietors of their own fate and the true tutors of national education.

We published in continuation the speeches given before the members of the organizing commission and the General Director of the Confederation, Dr. Enrique Romero Brest, in whose effective performance all teachers should invest their good faith given his honorable personal antecedents.

Purposes of the Confederation

(Speech of Julio R. Barcos)

Honored Delegates:

With profound joy I have accepted the honor that my illustrious colleagues of the commission have deferred to me, in designating for me this act of directing the word in this act is for me a truly significant event in the history of Argentine education.

It has been two years since by the mandate of the National League of Teachers I presented to the pedagogic congress convening in the city of San Juan the project of a National Congress of Education, a project in which said association picked up the book of Mr. Wherfield A. Salinas “The Teacher and his Organization” and that earned in this great assembly of educators, the honor of being discussed on the floor and approved by a unanimous vote. Today, the flower has matured into fruit, his idea has become realized, the utopia has converted into a sweet reality. Permit me this expression of legitimate pride: there is no reason to conceal the private satisfaction produced by the triumph of the beneficial initiatives before the sterile and failed philosophies of our narcissistic intellectuals, that not only insolate in a superficial and disdainful aristocracy, but also rise in cowardice and disputability against those that dream and work, persevere and produce.

Let us leave confirmed once more the principle that morality calls for action and that, the tolerance of that which is wrong, is not but—as much in the individual as in society—the passive form of immorality. “Action is everything, it is the touchstone of all ideas and the logical object of mental activity.” The world is full of wise theoreticians of truth, of good and justice, whose thoughts yield insignificant results […]