In one of the moments of the year in which the school appears very far away, without the haste and the emotion that distinguishes our lives, it can make sense to ask itself what school is, questioning its experience, the neighbor of umbrella, but also some big names.
What is school? Asking Don Lorenzo Milani means to feel that it is “a serious thing”, so serious as to have to be “addressed to the poor, to the last, to those who start disadvantaged”. For him, School means word, and word means dignity: “The problem of others is the same as mine. Establishing all together is politics. Eshing about it is avarice”. Ask Maria Montessori, to find out that it is “the place where freedom is cultivated through the discipline”, where the child is not a vase to be filled, but a flame to feed. “Help me to do alone”, whispers your method, which makes confidence its foundation. If we ask Gianni Rodari, the school becomes a gym of fantasy, choice and courage: “Is it worth a child by mitigating what can learn laughing?”
The school, for him, is the place where the words stretch, deform, multiply and become a game, dream, freedom. The school can therefore speak of war, indeed it must do it, finding the right words not to scandalize, but to educate the refusal of this aberrant relational dynamic. Asking Piero Calamandrei means to probe the socio -political theme of which the school must feel protagonist. The constituent father, in a famous speech to the 1950 students, warned: “Transforming subjects into citizens is a miracle that only school can perform.” School is the most powerful tool that democracy has to perpetuate itself. It is worth asking Malala Yousafzai, who survived fanaticism to defend the right to education, to find in the resistance school, emancipation, future: “a child, a teacher, a book and a pen can change the world”. How not to ask Italo Calvino, who in the school saw an opportunity for penalty and lightness together. If literature teaches to see what is not evident, then the school is the place where the gaze trains to see beyond appearance. Ask him from Enaiatollah Akbari – the protagonist of “In the sea there are Crocodiles” by Fabio Geda – who has gone through mountains and boundaries to look for it, the school, remembering his teacher, martyr for the freedom of his students. For Enaiat it was a memory and a distant promise, something that resembled a safe harbor, a place to sit and stay.
And now asking it to a child who every morning faces the path of language, integration, poverty in one of the many schools – often of the first cycle – present in Italy. For him, the school is still a frontier, but also refuge. It is the space where hope is played, it is still, perhaps, an opportunity for redemption. Ask a child from Gaza now, if you succeed. If he manages to talk to you from under the rubble, or above the silences, perhaps he will tell you that the school was a window on the world, or very poetically a part given for granted of his daily life before the blackboard shattered, until an explosion has turned off everything. And then you will understand that school is also what you lose when the war wins.
Ask a precarious teacher now, who changes the city, pupils, chairs every September, as in a lottery. For him, school is expected and bet, but also disappointment every stronger year. Ask a tired teacher, worn out by bureaucracy, by the cuts, by the noise that suffocates words. For him, school is effort that sometimes loses meaning. Ask him to a passionate teacher, who enters the classroom with seriousness and serenity, who sets the relationship with students and colleagues with professionalism and the affection that the roles allow, which still study. For him, school is chosen, also in the difficulties of an inadequate salary and an unspoken and mortified social role. And finally, ask him from any student, to the headlights off, without social networks, cameras, far from temptations of theater strokes that make a sensation. Maybe you will tell you about boredom, the sound of the bell, the surprise checks. But then he will also tell you about his friendships, of a teacher who believed in him, of a day when he understood who he wanted to be and who did not. And then you will understand that the school, after all, is this: a fragile, painful and powerful space where you can make mistakes, try, get bored, passionate, change. Where things happen, who are life, and who welcomes millions of people who deserve a better treatment than they have in the classroom, in the newspapers, in the paycheck and in everyone’s speeches, including politics.
