If I could, I’d start over this text with expressive emojis to represent the different faces of the families when some highschoolers (junior high and pre-university) returned from the first day of classes with that news.

My Javi among them, and I confess that I was so excited by the idea that I suddenly saw myself again among the furrows of Ceiba Mocha picking tomatoes, planting yucca or weeding. I recalled the dawns riding on the back of a cart, the fog, the jokes, the cold of the showers and the frogs, the nights of recreation and love and the visits from parents on Sundays. In total and putting everything in the balance: my son, a lot of fun, I summed up to my teenager.

But no, there will be no more camping or wooden suitcases, now it’s about socially useful work in the school or the community: pulling weeds from the garden, serving food at a nearby primary school, polishing the school hallways, working in a nearby vegetable garden and, in the afternoon, returning back home.

Many have complained (my Javi among them) and I understand them, because they are a generation of pioneers who never slept on a hammock at a scout center; if they camped, it was only metaphorically in the school yard, and when they were born, the camping sites had to be paid for in another currency.

However, I don’t understand the parents who belong to my generation, or the grandparents who, when we were teenagers, said goodbye to us without sadness to attend the school in the countryside for real, for a month or 45 days, convinced that it would help us grow and make us stronger and more independent men and women, and so it was, life proved them right.

Now we talk about the crystal generation, we criticize the loss of values, individualism, attachment to material things and technology, but it only takes one time for our children to get their hands dirty or their feet wet cleaning their schools for us to want to overprotect them as if they were, in fact, made of crystal.

The first argument in favor of the fact that doing productive work does not "kill anyone" is ourselves. In fact, this new modality makes more sense and coherence: students are taking care of their school and their community, a commitment we need to learn to save ourselves.

But since in many cases everything goes through mixing things up in that old confusion between political positions and civic spirit, I could argue that in the super-developed and very capitalist Japan, primary and secondary school students serve snacks and clean, including bathrooms, in most schools; it is a practice called o-soji.

"At school, a student doesn't just study subjects, he also learns to take care of what’s public and to be a more aware citizen," a teacher from the land of the rising sun said to the BBC.

"And nobody complains because it has always been that way," he added, and then explained:

"I also helped to take care of the school, just like my parents and grandparents did, and we are happy to receive the task because we acquire a responsibility."

According to the text, "students are divided into groups, each of which is responsible for washing what was used during meals and for cleaning the classroom, hallways, stairs and WCs in a rotating system coordinated by teachers."

"Learning to take care of what’s public," I'll stick with that phrase and with the one by Martí: children are the hope of the world, because it turns out that no future will be possible, no hope, if we don’t teach them, from now on, responsibility and commitment and, by the way, we allow them to live and venture, like us on those afternoons running through the irrigation or under the downpour, which may have left us with a cold, but more joy.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff