The power of the school: between responsibility and care
One hundred years ago, on May 27, 1923, Don Lorenzo Milani was born, in the comforts of a bourgeois family in which he will soon feel uncomfortable, as in a place too narrow to understand all the reality that will be close to his heart. We know the choices that will come, the priesthood, a mind turned on and never prone to established reality, even to the ecclesial one when it seemed to deviate from the truth of the Gospel, and the most famous of the writings associated with him: Letter to a professor.
From 1967, the year of the publication of the Letter, to today the social scenario has transformed, the school has profoundly changed and there is no room for easy parallelisms and interpretative flattening, but the strength of an intuition has not failed: knowledge represents a power, the possibility of avoiding the manipulations of common thought and the school has the task of promoting it in everyone. In a period in which the school’s defects, real and presumed faults are denounced and analyzed even in the media, let us not forget, on the basis of Don Milani, its strategic and democratic function, the opportunity it must represent.
Letter to a teacher
Letter to a teacher is the result of the collective writing of a group of students from the school founded in Barbiana, a remote location in the Tuscan Apennines, in the 1950s. It is the voice of a world condemned to remain on the margins of society, rejected by the official school and therefore excluded from access to trades that would have allowed economic and social progress. Here they study, under the guidance and charisma of Don Milani, who thought it up, strenuously wanted it and built it, the children of Tuscan peasants who in the text complain about an unapproachable school system, intended only for the “children of doctors”, for those who do not speak the dialect at home and can pay for private tutoring. For Don Lorenzo’s boys, school is not the way to redemption or a “social elevator”, but the confirmation of a destiny already mapped out, a system that pushes them away: “the schoolteacher”, they write, “boccia and leaves for the sea ”.
The poor … “you want them silent”
Studying the language is the prerequisite for exercising one’s rights and duties as citizens, for reading the news, for forming an opinion, to vote with awareness; too easy otherwise to be silenced and too risky to be forced not to think. The boys from Barbiana understood this: “Only language has equals. Equal is who knows how to express themselves and understands the expression of others. Whether rich or poor matters less. Just talk.”
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