Schools are reopening and what is expected will be a difficult year. Difficult due to the degree of suffering of girls and boys, difficult for those who teach, because the unsolved problems of the school have been badly addressed and are almost completely absent in this electoral campaign, difficult because the first funds of the PNRR risk being lost in a thousand streams without a long-term strategy, capable of combating early school leaving and educational poverty starting from the most degraded areas and in need of far-sighted interventions.
So what can the teacher do?
Very, very much, because we know that in the experiences that are lived in the classroom the main difference is given by the human quality, the openness to the world, the curiosity towards girls and boys and the desire to research and not take anything for granted. of those who teach.
With the current times and the bad moods circulating the first question to ask should be this: what I am proposing to girls and boys creates community or contracts the group spirit? Does it provoke competitiveness and indifference to the fate of others or does it generate openness towards companions and companions?
This question does not concern only the method, the sociability, the well-being in the classroom, but it highlights the idea of knowledge and research that we build day after day together, that is the very meaning of studying and staying at school, the meaning which can collectively build a lively and lively relationship with art, science and culture.
In a society disheartened by so many disparities and distances, which too often turn into discrimination, being together among different people, as happens in many primary and middle schools, constitutes the first encounter and the first experience of openness to the other and of democracy, the first place where we can experience thinking together.
The next step is to realize that by thinking together we understand more, because in the constant confrontation between different opinions we learn to argue and reason.
I remember David who in the fifth grade, in the course of a passionate discussion born from the reading of Plato’s myth of the cave, said “you better think yours”. With that statement he underlined how much the comparison with others stimulated by Plato’s text had helped him to better understand what he thought and how he elaborated his own reasonings, it had helped him to measure the degree of autonomy and freedom that he could achieve, and this creed should be the main objective of any educational work.
“Throughout my career I believe I have respected what is most sacred in the boy: the right to seek his own truth”. So Louis Germain, the primary school teacher whom Albert Camus was lucky enough to meet as a child in Algiers, replied to the letter in which the writer thanked him after receiving the Nobel Prize. “The first thought, after my mother, was for her”, wrote Camus, because “without her teaching and her example, there would have been none of this”.
Slowing down, lingering, lingering for a long time around open questions and giving dignity, space and breath to each and everyone’s own reasoning is the best response to a world degraded by simplifications, aggressiveness and growing intolerances, by an idea of homeland and of borders which contrasts with the principle of universal equality which is the basis of our constitution.
It is here that in the school we can carry out our most precious task, facing the effort of navigating against the wind, promoting, stimulating and continuously experimenting the dialogue between different people, as a privileged place for building knowledge. Knowledge, in fact, cannot be transmitted, it can only be constructed, and each one assembles and rearranges them in his own way. This is why it is so difficult to reach and involve everyone and everyone. For this reason teaching is a very complex artisan trade, the quality of which is measured in the attention to detail.
But to get to all this we have to give ourselves time, create contexts in which careful mutual listening is experienced and refine our abilities to give dignity to everyone’s thought. We must provide and learn to use different languages knowing how to put ourselves in relationships and grasp the great transformations that the younger generations go through in their relationship with their body and with others, with words and images, with music, games and rhythms that create new skills. and new attention difficulties.
In the great crisis affecting economy and politics, climate and energy, peace and coexistence between different people, enormous fields of investigation are opening up to be experimented. The school should always aim to be the place where the past comes into tension with the present and thoughts conceived in other eras can help us to illuminate the many obscures and uncertainties of today with oblique light, managing to disturb and amaze us.