Between new urgencies and old expectations, the school returns to the center of debate and conflict and is called to solve society’s problems
There is always a good reason to ask the school to take on something new. Today it is sexual education, yesterday it is civic education, tomorrow it will be emotional or digital education. Every time has its needs, and school – the public institution par excellence, a place of education and citizenship – cannot escape. However, not everything can pass through there. You can’t imagine the school as one toolbox for life, ready to provide practical solutions to every social emergency. Because school is not this – or at least, not only this. It is the place where thought is constructed, not where immediate answers are dispensed. Sexual and emotional education, for example, can certainly have a literary side: through reading, reflection, great authors – from Dante to Flaubert, from Svevo to Moravia, from Elsa Morante to Fred Uhlman’s Amico Rediscovered – literature can educate on the complexity of feelings, desire, relationships, but reading great books and meeting great masters can no longer be enough: not all students are ready to read and appreciate Madame Bovary or the fifth canto of Hell, and not everyone follows humanistic paths. School is for everyone, even for those who train in professionals, for those who learn with practical and direct languages. It is a delicate discussion and for this reason urgent. Furthermore, it is easily exploited by those who are ready to shout that “even in professional schools there is literature”, that “there are no A students and no B students”, thus once again losing sight of the heart of the matter and arriving at hasty conclusions, reducing a discussion that is intended to be constructive to controversy. Do we need a new language, a concrete approach, capable of adapting to different ages, different schools, different people? Excellent, it must be sought by studying the model and proposing other possibilities, because a little time is not enough to patch up a system in crisis. Yet, the institutional response is often entrusted – or rather, delegated – to the good will of the individual teacher or to an external trainer who, however prepared, capable and interesting he may be, inevitably almost always proposes a standard intervention, not calibrated to the individual class. And for many students that hour, that module, is experienced as a relief, an hour less of lessons, not as an educational moment.
Don Milani, once again, can be useful: in a time when the school is called to “do everything”, sixty years ago he wrote definitive words: “The school has only one problem. The kids it loses.” And again: “There is nothing as unjust as giving equal shares to unequals” (Letter to a teacher1967). In these sentences there is the root of every educational discourse: the school is not called to teach anything, but not to lose anyone; it is not committed to leveling, but to including; it cannot respond to every social emergency, but it can give everyone the conditions to understand the world, face it and, if possible, change it. For Don Milani – we could say summarizing his thoughts – the school is “a hospital that treats the sick” and therefore must take care of those who are left behind, not those who are already safe, or at least not primarily those who are already saved, or have enough tools – in themselves and around them – to do so. This applies to linguistic skills, but also to an education in being together, in citizenship, in relationships. This is where we must start again: from the idea that school cannot do everything, but can – and must – be the place where equality is rebuilt, through example, good daily practice, humanistic culture, and – but how? It’s all to be understood – the treatment of new, complex topics that are difficult to evaluate and verify, like what we’ve been talking about in recent years. We therefore need to find a space – as has always been the case – for today’s needs, remembering that schools cannot do it alone, because what affects education is not just an hour of sexual or civic education, but also and above all the example of adults, public language, the tone of the debate. If the models that come from politics, the media or social media are aggressive, confused, vulgar, if the objective of every confrontation is to overwhelm the other, prevent one from speaking, humiliate, then the school, with its limited tools, cannot straighten out on its own what the whole world bends every day. In the meantime, the school continues to defend – with difficulty – its founding core: basic linguistic and mathematical knowledge, foreign languages, aesthetic and taste education, critical thinking. Preserving them does not mean being against new teachings, but remembering that any insertion cannot take place at the expense of what supports the structure of education.
Finally, political exploitation. Every educational theme, every attempt at innovation, becomes a terrain of ideological conflict. Thus the school – which should be a laboratory of thought and the future – becomes hostage to flags and slogans. This is why we need a broad vision, finally shared: no more micro-reforms at zero cost, no more superficial responses. It’s time to ask ourselves what school we want for 2030, which for an elephant like school is tomorrow. A school that does not chase the news, but builds culture (which does not mean erudition!); that does not pursue consensus, but cultivates conscience. Because, if we continue to change one piece at a time, without a plan and without courage, the school not only risks having no future: it risks no longer even having a present.
