For the past two weeks, after forty years, I have returned to high school in Italy, this time as a teacher. My first impression is that very little has changed, and the changes have been for the worse. Bureaucracy dominates; nobody who is there gives the impression that they want to be there, and the bathrooms have not been refurbished since then, or earlier.
There is a lot of anxiety among teachers about their mission as educators, and a lot of anxiety among students about performing. The system of evaluation is strict, and the curricula are the same ones I knew as a student, 95% at least.
My students are wonderful, budding human beings. From my vantage point, I can surmise a lot of their curiosities, fears, and inner conflicts. They look very transparent to me.
But what can I teach them? And what can they learn? They are forced to stay in class seven hours per day, sometimes nine hours, seated at their desks, with two short breaks. They are fed an enormous amount of information from a dozen different subjects. When they get back home, after 3 pm, they are supposed to read, study, and memorize. They are always tired.
Their environment outside of school has been transformed into a vanity fair of opinions. Truth has been thrown out of the window, and nobody cares about real expertise on any subject whatsoever. Their school environment is the opposite. Truth is given to them pre-packaged, and their opinion is never asked. Nor does anybody seem to care about their feelings or intuitions — the system simply is not built to accommodate those.
Can anything but a schizophrenic mindset be produced by such a situation? And who is profiting from it except the neo-fascist tendencies in society, who thrive on confused citizens? The sad irony is that the official guidelines say that teachers are supposed to collaborate in the formation of “participatory active citizens.”
Many decades ago, Marie-Dominique Chenu spoke of “exhausted pedagogy,” an expression that perfectly fits my experience at the moment. His student, Matthew Fox, answered to Chenu’s call for a deep change with his A.W.E. proposal — meaning Ancestral Wisdom Education — which is light-years away from the situation I find myself in.
What can I do? I am just at the beginning and I will keep my readers posted, but in the meantime I have come up with three ideas: (1) I am trying to teach my students the inner workings of the disciplines I teach — history and philosophy — and not just what historians and philosophers have said through the ages; (2) I proposed a workshop for teachers on the topics of empathic communication; (3) I am trying to get a rapper invited to the school who works with high school students to help them express their fears and hopes.
The fact that I recently met by mere chance a rapper who does that — just as Matt Fox met Professor Pitt years ago doing the same thing — is one of those coincidences that look rather like a synchronicity.
We need wisdom schools and not just knowledge factories! * Thanks Matt! That’s my new mantra!
* Matthew Fox, Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest, p. 356.
Banner Image: A tired teacher at her desk. Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
Queries for Contemplation
What similarities and differences do you find in your school experience? What can you do to improve the way in which knowledge is transmitted and wisdom is reached?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human
Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest
Creativity: Where the Divine and Human Meet
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
Trump & The MAGA Movement as Anti-Christ
7 thoughts on “Educating under the Shadow of Neo-Fascism (part two)”
In the Recommended Reading section above in today’s DM, Matthew’s book, “Creativity, Where the Divine and Human Meet,” seems to be an excellent one to remind us, students and teachers, that we’re All uniquely part of Our SOURCE~CO-CREATOR’S LIVING SPIRIT of LOVE~WISDOM~CREATIVITY PRESENT within, through, among Us guiding, healing, strengthening, and transforming Us in our daily lives with meaning and purpose to lead COMPASSIONATE lives with All sentient beings in All physical/nonphysical spiritual dimensions in LOVING DIVERSE ONENESS of Our Evolving Cosmos with-in the Divine Flow of the ETERNAL PRESENT MOMENT….
Thank you for this, Gianluigi, and best wishes. I will be very curious to read further episodes of your adventures facing the generational chasm. I can hardly imagine how it may feel to be a teenager in today’s world, and I surely would not like to be one. The challenge is to fascinate them more than their pocket screens and to overcome the official confusion between e-ducation and in-doctrination. Thomas Berry offers some useful suggestions in chapter 8 of “The Dream of the Earth.”
Synchronicity G. The students need someone such as yourself to connect to their deep inner knowing intuition. The artist rapper sounds like a great start. Hopefully the institution does not shut it down.
Hi Gianluigi. There is such sadness in the situation you find yourself in. I hope you are able to change things at least in your own classrooms, as I know you hope to do. I was a junior high teacher in the late 1960s, and because I had been mentored by a high school teacher who followed the principles of A.S. Neill, I was able to follow the principles of Summerhill quite a bit in my 8th and 9th grade classes. Some of my working-class students were 16 years if age because they hadn’t advanced due to “poor performance.” Perhaps the principal let me get away with the things I did because my 9th-grade students were the students who were struggling. The same thing happened when I taught in Luton, England for a year. My students were the ones not expected to succeed. Doing the unusual helped these kids do so much better than expected. Alas, that was the 1960s and early 70s when, even with conservative pushback, there was far more freedom. I’m sure I’d be sacked today. Oh, how I wish you well! There’s always a way to be subversive and actually help one’s “kids” in ways they really need, as I know you know.
It sounds as if you are going to teach them how to think, and that is always exciting both for the teacher and the students. You are going to show them what a compassionate as well as an intelligent man is like. Blessings and prayers for you and them.
Is the rapper you met Amir Issaa? If so, he is an amazing and inspiring educator! Readers in the U.S. can learn of his life in the translation of his memoir, This is What I Live For— https://sdsupress.sdsu.edu/amirISSAA_preorder.html
GG this is a wonderful and hopeful outcome of your having to go back into that classroom environment! I am excited to hear how it goes. Getting students to be interested and engaged in learning is so important! THANK YOU!