Everything that is missing from school (and how to get it back)
Once upon a time there was a school where people went willingly, which deserved the trust of families and social consideration. Then came the wind of change and this school slowly disappeared, replaced by another school – sometimes better, sometimes worse – but fundamentally faceless and without identity. Francesco Provinciali's article
No context better than the school manages to coagulate the sedimentation processes of culture.
In the sense that – by definition – it transmits that of the past, reflects that of the present and is a training laboratory for that of the future.
Each of these three tasks must be co-present with the others otherwise the school itself ends up being respectively a mere place for the transfer of notions, an uncritical mirror of the times or a forge of rootless planning.
In the institutionalized paths of education and training we read the reasons for continuity and innovation which explain the role of the training system in the society of democracy and participation.
The identity of the school manifests itself in a continuous oscillation between ratio and traditio , between stability and changes, between conservation and change, in the search for points of balance on principles, values, rules, ideals.
In its social accreditation, this institution is both the custodian of received traditions and the agency for their critical reworking.
Now I believe that for some years now (I could say for a few decades) a drift strongly oriented towards making the reasons for discontinuity and change for its own sake prevail has exponentially accentuated.
As Ernesto Galli della Loggia shrewdly wrote, once the names of Dante, Galilei, Leopardi and Manzoni resounded loudly in our classrooms.
Today, a large part of the pedagogical effort is mainly spent teaching children not to use cell phones in the classroom, not to eat snacks and not to pick their noses (and what is worse is that this largely corresponds to expectations of social type). Not to mention the cases in which it is necessary to stop the rampant bullying towards classmates and the teachers themselves: no longer bravado but real acts of hooliganism.
A hopeless run-up if you think you won't lose your connection with the concrete, the daily and guide the processes of social change by banning the study and enhancement of our best cultural traditions.
Because our children know how to use the pc, they access the internet and communicate with the world in their own way but they are no longer able to use a dictionary, they cannot write, they cannot speak without sinking into interlayers of dubious good taste and bad education.
Once upon a time there was a school where people went willingly, which deserved the trust of families and social consideration.
A school where the teachers were in the chair and the pupils in the desks.
Then came the wind of change and this school slowly disappeared, replaced by another school – sometimes better, sometimes worse – but fundamentally faceless and without identity.
A place of passage (one of the many "training agencies", as we wanted to rename it) where one no longer willingly stops, to savor the incomparable taste of the slowly transmitted and slowly assimilated culture.
A school that has lost many words along the way that are no longer used: respect, tradition, values, merit.
A fast-food school, but that's a story we'll talk about another time.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/tutto-quello-che-della-scuola-non-ce-piu-e-come-recuperarlo/ on Sat, 25 Feb 2023 06:35:20 +0000.