Open problems – Domenico Starnone

◆ Return to the book by Vanessa Roghi ( The brave sparrow , Laterza 2022). The book exhumes the struggles for the democratization of the school, the fights in the same left, the work of many teachers summarized in the figure of Mario Lodi. And it reminds us that, for about twenty years (between 1955 and 1975 at a guess), the school – first elementary and then the other grades – was alive, in mutation. He does it by moving from Cipì , the subversive fable that Lodi had written together with his pupils, inspired by the Educational Cooperation Movement, and which had prepared the way for Don Milani of Barbiana. Then Lodi himself – shows Roghi – realizes that the training of teachers, for example in the face of a great achievement such as full time, is inadequate. Inadequacy that those who started teaching in the sixties know well. Only the most curious looked around perplexed, read, wanted to try a new school. We carried the school that had brought us up and it seemed natural – or comfortable – to repeat it over and over again. Thus, at the end of the seventies, old and new mutually disintegrate, school practice impoverishes the inventive effort by making it bureaucratized, the political-cultural climate changes. But the problems remain open, and indeed in recent decades they become dangerously complicated. Roghi is right to redeploy the past in battle, it will begin again.