If you think the education is expensive, try with ignorance. I believe that the most effective argument in favor of school and public education Both of the American Derek Bok, former Rector of Harvard: the instruction costs but ignorance costs more.
The sick school and forgotten masters
In these days the institutes are reopen, and that huge sick beast, for decades now, starts moving with the difficulties of all time. The problem is not the ministers, who pass as a meteor and leave little traces on the wounded body of the school, but the masters. Yes, the masters. A time as soon as you said school you said masters. Today no longer; obsolete term, valid at the time of De Amicis.
Ivano Dionigi’s pamphlet
Indeed, to the Maestro to Magister, he dedicates from the title a passionate pamphlet (published by Laterza) Ivano Dionigi, Latinist and essayist who claims the irreplaceable centrality of this figure in the classes. Yes, but is it possible to have masters in a society without heirs, as I defined our era in a recent essay, in a society and in a school that bask in techno-economic current affairs, freeing themselves of every teacher and every legacy received and to be transmitted?
School as a temple
Dionigi starts from a quote from pastures that consecrated the school in Temple of the new age, a source of the religion of the homeland and humanity. A quote that belongs not only to another story but also to another humanity and another ideal vision of life and the world. Dionigi relies on the classics, integrated by some modern, to relaunch their essential role in a society in which the family and the Church falter, and also other public agencies – also think of the parties – who are no longer able to guide young people. The school should not pursue modernity and technology but be counterweight, Marc Fumaroli rightly says and we have also supported it for years.
Educate and not just educate
On the desks does not teach a job but the ability to learn, attention, criteria and vision, and therefore what precedes and motivates work. And the essential verb of the master remains what is now expelled from the classrooms and rejected by many teachers: educating. And then he teaches to speak well to think well, nourish the critical sense, distinguish the means from the purposes, overcome the provincialism of the time of which Eliot spoke, that is, the gaze limited only to our present.
Culture and politics at school
Dionigi believes that it is senseless to leave politics out of school, because it is the task of this place to be a polis, to train citizens. And the trouble of our years is the separation between culture and politics, among knowledge and power. Right, but we cannot forget the abuse of politics that has been done to you, since the time of “everything is political” to the ideological administration that still persists in the new Wake and politically correct catechisms. Dionysius, who comes from communism and has been parliamentary alongside the PCI, does not consider the nefarious politicization of the institution of the past decades that has worsened it very much. It would be to be distinguished between the regulatory ideal of a school that also forms politics, and the practice of these years, where ideology has mortified culture, opening, critical sense and has imposed canons and complaints dictated by its partisan spirit.
The world within the classes
Even the hope of bringing the world into the classes is ambiguous, it can mean meeting life, reality, the variety of the world but can flatten school in a clumsy imitation of what happens outside, or worse in its subordination to the spirit of time and the issues of the moment that would betray precisely those educational and compensatory tasks with respect to the extension of current affairs and practical life.
Where are the masters?
The teacher, is true, must not be an instructor and an institution but something more, but then mercilessly ask ourselves: yes, it must be, but is it really? Where are the masters who go beyond those tasks and those duties? Where do they form, who selects them? Are there masters of the masters? Can we ignore the real quality and the average effective level of today’s teachers?
Between artificial intelligence and tradition
Dionigi also touches existential issues and philosophical themes and then gliding in the reality of the school besieged by artificial intelligence, which can be – needless to say – a great and beneficial opportunities such as a wretched replacement of the human. It depends as governments technology, and above all if you govern it. And proposes the necessary question of finding a harmonious balance between scientific knowledge and humanistic knowledge, through their mutual benefit, to finally spend themselves in a praise of tradition, which seems indispensable to us. Each educational institution is based on a tradition, every knowledge is transmission and therefore tradition, culture and memory feed on tradition, the very figure of the master is the one who collects a tradition and delivery to his learners. But also the maximum with which he then dismisses from the reader is beautiful and dangerous at the same time: I want “you are what you want to be”.
The ego against the masters
I understand the meaning that he gives, to follow his vocation, have the opportunity and the freedom to do it, succeed in life to achieve his task, follow his demon. The teacher is the one who should put you in a position to do it. But today the maximum is addressed exactly on the contrary: to lose the ego I am in the ego I want, not to accept one’s limits and to cultivate the self -centered self -portrait: I want to feel good with myself. Then of the world, of the others, of tradition and the masters who cares. The ego is the enemy of the school and the masters.
