Covering the Cover: Educating Humans

For this issue’s cover art we returned to the work of Spanish artist Pilar López Báez, whose nuanced depictions of childhood as well as the interactions between children and adults have drawn international acclaim and won several awards. López Báez painted the cover art for the Summer 2024 issue of Plough.

The apple has long been a symbol of education. Children would give their teacher an apple as a token of appreciation. There was a time when such apples were counted on to supplement the teacher’s paltry wages.

As the title of this issue implies, we are all in need of being educated. We are, or ought to be, actively engaged in the lifelong process of becoming better humans. Such education is reciprocal: it means learning with children and from children as well as teaching them, receiving wisdom as well as imparting it, looking to the past as well as to the future. As López Báez writes:

Our past builds our identity; everything we have ever experienced or felt leaves its mark on us. The present inevitably finds us on an uncertain path, for which we’ll needs those memories and teachings. This painting, In Principio, reflects not only on the legacy of our past but also on the present, which begins every moment. It is a poetic reflection: the girl and the woman can be read as different stages of life. The woman seems to evoke the future and the girl the past, but it could also be read in the other way around.

Children need us to guide them as they grow into the people they were meant to be, but as Jesus once said, we also need to become more like children.

On the back cover:

Dilleen Marsh, We Carry Our Happiness with Us, oil on panel, 2017