
Juan Luis Yagüe, CEO of Grupo Educativo Casvi, has been today one of the protagonists of the second round table discussion ‘Madrid, university community’, of the VII Education Day organized by the digital newspaper Madridiario.
It has sought to answer the question “Is Madrid a leading university community worldwide? To achieve this, the participants, together with Juan Luis Yagüe, Ricardo Díaz, General Director of Universities of the Community of Madrid, Juan Luis Yagüe and Pedro Irastorza, General Director of the Villanueva University, participated. All under the baton of Constantino Mediavilla, president of the Madridiario and Diariocritico groups.
Thus, among other things, topics such as vocation, teaching, the importance of complementary training, internationalization and employability, some of the keys in the transition to the university of the future, were discussed.
“Nobody is going to be good at something they don’t like”. This is how categorical Yagüe has been about the importance of vocation, both for students and for teachers themselves. “We tell our students that they should study what they really like. What they are passionate about,” he adds. For this, Grupo Educativo Casvi is committed to “getting the child to reflect, from 1st and 2nd ESO, about what he/she likes and in what field and career he/she could develop. Guidance programs play a very important role in this regard.
A commitment to vocation, however, would not be possible without competent teachers who are capable of educating people beyond the curriculum. “Good student education is created by good teachers, vocational teachers who are passionate about their work and love it. We often forget about teachers, and they are fundamental in the integral formation of students. They must be good professionals and, above all, people capable of going out into society and transforming it. From school to university, teachers must be an example and make students fall in love with them,” says Díaz.
Irastorza, general director of Villanueva University, has focused on the importance of combining training courses which, until now, have been watertight compartments, unrelated to each other, in order to offer a more complete education oriented towards greater employability. “We must combine different training, even between science and literature, and thus bring together more complete professionals”, he says.
In terms of internationalization, the speakers agreed on the importance of exchange programs, both for students and teachers. “The idea is to encourage our students and teachers to go to other schools and get to know different realities. It’s also about foreign students coming to Madrid. Sitting with someone who thinks differently opens the mind and enriches a lot in terms of multiculturalism. In addition, our region has all the ingredients to attract talent from abroad: a wide range of educational and cultural offerings, good public services, public safety…”, they say.
Importance of employability
The closing of the round table focused on the importance of employability when designing the education that students should receive. “The Community of Madrid has the potential to become, in the near future, the leading university community in the world. I am convinced that this is the case, but in order to achieve this we must combine tradition with modernity and research. We must also adapt our training programs to the needs of the world’s productive fabric and thus achieve an even greater degree of employability. This is the only way to ensure that our students will be able to compete for a position, whether at university or in the workplace, with any other citizen in the world”, concluded Díaz.