From classrooms to changing rooms, the adult inability to handle the frustration or even just the evaluation of their children is growing. And so every criticism becomes a wrong and every unwelcome decision an injustice
We start from school, because it is there that the phenomenon appears most clearly and with a frequency that no longer surprises those who work in the classroom every day. A low grade, a disciplinary note, a failure represent ordinary passages in the life of a student and mark stages that can be part of the learning path, yet more and more often they become a reason for conflict between adults, with the teacher reporting a difficulty and the parent intervening with the aim of contesting and defending the child, transforming an educational moment into a dispute. In recent years, the idea has spread that every form of judgment constitutes violence and that every failure demonstrates an external error, with failure no longer indicating a gap and being perceived as a wrong suffered, while failure loses its value as a stop and a possible restart and is experienced as an injustice. In this passage a clear fracture opens up, because the school continues to carry out an essential function of evaluation, correction and indication of limits, while the educational pact with families weakens precisely at the moment in which a child would need to be accompanied to recognize a mistake and start again. The teacher’s job is in fact largely to point out errors and correct them, yet it seems that this task can no longer be carried out with serenity. Will we finally be happy when teachers are entertainers, givers of lessons-conferences and wishers of happy holidays without homework?
The ancients wrote assiduously about failures and shipwrecks, aware that they were part of everyone’s existence: today, however, it happens that failure – or even just disappointment! – is progressively removed and circumvented, and this attitude has its roots already in a phase prior to entering school, within an educational model that has reduced children’s exposure to frustration and which arises from the adult difficulty of tolerating even minimal suffering. To cite two great current contributions, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes a generation that grew up in conditions of overprotection and risk reduction, a generation that reaches adolescence with fragile tools and with little familiarity with error, while the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has identified in contemporary society a tendency to avoid pain and delegate it, to the point of transforming it into a blame attributed to someone. Within the school this someone often becomes the teacher, while the same scheme easily extends to other contexts of growth, such as sport, where a technical choice or a bench are interpreted as an injustice and where the figure of the coach, called to educate through decisions and limits, is perceived as hostile. The singer-songwriter Brunori SAS, in his “According to me” sings “if there is one thing that scares me about the Western world it is this imperative to remove pain”, where by pain here we do not mean anything dramatic: in our bourgeois homes a good grade is enough to break the bank when an excellent one is expected, or a call-up that does not arrive for a championship match. Even in everyday life, every reminder risks taking the form of an affront, with a progressive difficulty in recognizing the educational value of the limit: it is not necessary to evoke daily crime news cases to realize this.
Added to this picture is a pedagogical misunderstanding which concerns the way in which the thought of Maria Montessori is evoked, for example, often used to support an idea of freedom without guidance and adult intervention, while the Montessori method is based on a structured, intentional and demanding environment, in which freedom develops within clear boundaries and within a strong educational relationship. “Demanding”, “clear boundaries”, “strong educational relationship”: science fiction, if you look around, so much so that the current translation of this misrepresented and misunderstood approach has in many cases produced a renunciation of the adult role, with children growing up without a real experience of limits and without an authentic confrontation with error. The question then concerns the presence of adults in the lives of children, in time management, in the use of devices, in relationships with others and in the way in which educational figures are described, because every word spoken at home contributes to building or demolishing that alliance. Being a parent requires a high level of commitment and awareness, because the complexity of the context makes every educational choice more difficult and requires a constant and intentional presence. Each generation has cultivated the belief that it can improve the previous one, even on an educational level, and this aspiration can represent a resource when it translates into responsibility and the ability to question oneself. Those who have children at school today still have time and concrete possibilities to significantly impact their growth path, provided that the desire to fully assume their role and start again when necessary, with patience and determination, emerges. School can make its contribution, as can sport and other educational contexts, while the family remains the place where everything takes shape and meaning, the place where one learns to stay within reality, which is also made up of mistakes and failures, accepting some limits, learning to apologize, assuming one’s responsibilities. The question remains open and calls into question adult responsibility in a direct and concrete way, because educating means accompanying children into real life, with all that this entails, and means offering them the tools to navigate it with realism, tools and awareness. Who’s there?
