Last bench of Alessandro D’Avenia | The secret life of banks. The health of the school is the health of the country

The place that came to me the first day of school was the last bench. I was five years old and, in that September 1982 of still the excitement of the world, the last year of kindergarten began, a place where learning and playing were the same for me. But the teacher, my first love, took me by the hand and said, “Change classes today.” I trusted her blindly: she could only give me good things. When the door of the new classroom was opened, however, I understood that they wanted to make me grow and for this they needed a little pain and a little fear: no one had explained to me that I would do what was then called “primina”. Then the teacher left my hand and gave my childhood to the hard work of life, which involves knowing how to read, write and do arithmetic. In an instant I had lost my games, my friends and my love. The only free seat was on the last bench, which she occupied with her head bowed and tears running down her eyes. I didn’t even know which was the last bench, in kindergarten the benches were grouped into islands: you looked your friends in the face and threw your hands into a space where what appeared to our eyes were priceless treasures (sheets, colors, books, Poso …). And the teacher toured the islands of this creative archipelago: she was everywhere, like the sea.

In first grade, however, the benches became trenches and the teacher the enemy rising from a position that seemed remote and threatening to me. Of the new companions I could only see their backs: at least I could hide my shame and overcome my pain in peace. But the new teacher (my second love) soon brought me out of my sadness, showing me some posters hanging on the walls, in each of which a vivid image represented a letter of the alphabet. My imagination went to work immediately, generating 21 characters wrapped in stories invisible to the adult eye, but not to a child who, in the blank spaces between one billboard and another, could see the adventures of which, in the school closed. , those characters were protagonists: what did gnomes, butterflies, cherries, bees …? The stories helped me name the unclear things in life and anticipate my dreams.: more than doing accounts, I wanted to make a “story”. The last bank thus became for me an interior place, from which I could imagine more because it is seen more: not a hiding place for “smuggling” activities, but a sentry post. These letters, since then, illuminate the space of pain and fear, making it more visible and therefore more habitable., because this is what culture does: make life more livable, lighting it up at least a little bit, even when that light illuminates things we don’t like. Always better than the dark.

This is where I would like to start in a period that has confirmed what I have been repeating for years: school health is the health of the country. The health emergency did not weaken the school system, but evidenced the coma. The reboot is making sadly evident the wounds – continuous cuts and misoperations – aggravated in recent years by governments of all colors. I would return to that child whose recourse against fear and pain, yesterday as today, continues to be the culture that serves to give meaning to reality, to be able to face it with precision instruments and without running away. I can’t wait to go back to school because I’ll see my children that I haven’t known since March. And I know that together, doing well what we have to do, we will face all difficulties and invent the future, because only generative relationships make things grow and only a deep culture brightens things up, especially the dark ones. At school, the issue is not the health emergency, but what we will do, educationally, culturally, and politically with the emergency. The projects give meaning to the objects and not the other way around: the school will not be renewed from the desk alone or from the tablet, but from the life that we can give it, thanks to good relationships and a job well done. But if we are not able to give the present a meaning that goes beyond the prison of the news, we will leave children and young people behind bars, because the absence of meaning fills the interior space with fear, paralyzes the action or makes it manipulable . . The task of teachers and parents has always been to free “the new” interior, like Guido (Roberto Benigni) in Life is BeautifulTo save his son he even turns the concentration camp into a prize game, making sense of the most absurd evil. But this requires the inventiveness that only love and culture can awaken.Banks, masks and connections, alone, will never be enough. Educators are asked to make the emergency a fertile ground, first for us and then for them, because nothing grows in the little ones, if it doesn’t find care, light and freedom, in the big ones. Good start everyone.