n. 9
settembre 2012

 

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The good life of the Gospel
Educational programs in schools

  by GIUSEPPE SAVAGNONE

  

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The school currently operates in a very different cultural context from that of fifty years ago. Do not take this into account would mean, for educators, committed suicide as teachers, because they would speak to nonexistent parties and would make meaningless to the real ones.
The first task of the educator today is, therefore, that of listening. It is to perceive the needs of the world that is emerging and to discuss one in which we were grown, not to deny it, but to make a necessary discernment of what is truly essential.

Today there are those who believe cultural change under way a danger and that's. In fact, what is happening has its dangers, and in the concept of risk it is implicit, of course, the idea of ​​a hazard, but also the opportunities that are linked and that can push to deal with the hope of gain.

The danger of the contemporary culture often arises from the distortion of instances in itself positive, which is necessary to purify, not to reject as a whole. This means that it is not going back (really we would love to return to the company of fifty, a hundred years ago?), but to go forward, to try new and more humane balance.

In this spirit we will approach to the problem of education in schools, starting from an initial awareness of what happens in society and problematic or negative aspects of the change taking place entails. However, counterbalanced by the discovery of the positive things that is inherent in it, than in the past, finally reaching the point that more specifically here interest to us, that the identification of responses that the school can give.

Of the four major dimensions that are proper of education - so they are of the human person - ie being (personal identity), being-from (origin and history), being-with (relational and Community sphere), being-for (the sense, in both senses of "meaning" and "direction/management"), [i] we will develop here only the first.


The eclipse of the subject

We are witnessing the sunset of the strong, monolithic identities. Don Camillo and Peppone were still personalities in one piece. An example of the men and women who the modern age had shaped. Moreover, the subject of self is central to all modern culture, in philosophy (from Cartesian cogito to the ego of Kant,  to the absolute ego of idealism), in literature (the more or less titanic figure of "hero" of the tragedies or of modern novels), in the visual arts (the portrait), in the music (where Chopin’s nocturnes and symphonies of Beethoven are emerging in a striking way the sphere of subjectivity).

To have a concise representation of what happened in post-modernity we can perhaps compare the image of the human face, as it was portrayed by great painters from the Renaissance onwards, with what you can find in a painting by Picasso: an harmonic, composed vision, unified by the laws of perspective, a tangle of lines and color aims to represent facial features under different perspectives and incompatible with each other, until it is unrecognizable.
Something similar also occurred in the literature (One, no, a hundred thousand of Pirandello), in music (we are thinking to the twelve-tone), in philosophy. For Nietzsche, the self is only "a fable, a fiction, a play on words”.
[ii] It is nothing more - in his view - but a mask hiding the chaotic flow of contradictory impulses by which man, as besides, the whole of reality, is crossed.
In the wake of this thinker, all contemporary thought seems to have the objective of "deconstructing classical subjectivity and thus undoing the supposed unity of the subject”.[iii] Beyond the subject is the title of the essay of one of the most famous Italians thinkers in recent years, Gianni Vattimo.

This fragmentation of the ego becomes, in the reality of everyday experience, the form of a radical difficulty of young people - but not only them - to find their own inner unity. Accomplice to the overabundance of stimulus, messages, opportunities, experiences, offered – better: imposed – by the consumer society. They tend to disperse in a thousand different identities, all coexisting within them. One student, a few years ago, wrote in a theme: "I try in vain to be the majority shareholder of that company of changing majorities in my self."
For this reason it has become difficult, today, to speak of vocation to religious life, but also to marriage or politics or to some work. If instead of the one subject there is a myriad of drives and forums -a nebula- if this nebula's more in constantly changing, who should be the subject of the call?


The wealth of possibility

As problematic, however, this framework should not be considered in a purely negative key. We do not want to return to the model of "strong" and unique identities. It was under it that so many people -women especially- had to give up the wealth of aspirations, skills, talents, to overlay the true face  the iron mask of a unique identity, with respect to which this wealth was a scandal.

It's true. Now the question has become the inseparable companion, rather than the enemy, of faith. The problems of road has replaced the ruler safety by which time it ran. But we are so confident that this weakness is not at the end nearer to the Gospel of Titanism of the modern ego? That the Christian model of kenosis not find better represented in these troubled paths zig zag, and in the streets without a fork in the past? And the vulnerability is not perhaps, in the Christian viewpoint, the mark of a God who, to be similar to us, he wanted to be poor, helpless, lost?

The challenge now -and not just for Catholics!- is to run the risk of certain complexity and fragility of the new cultural climate, overcoming the temptation to demonize them, but without renouncing at the same time, to retrieve an inner core of the subject, allowing him to be himself in this multiplicity of issues and experiences. It is clear the role that can and should play in this education. Here we propose to consider what takes place within the school.


Besides the split between culture and life

What is striking, and that should alarm, in the school experience, is not ignorance of the pupils -that is physiological, not otherwise would attend to the school- but their boredom. The things they study do not interest them. Because the school fails to highlight their relationship
with the real life of these kids. At best of hypothesis it leads them into an enchanted world of knowledge that, as interesting in themselves, have nothing to do with their everyday problems. And when, at the last bell, students go out of classrooms and laboratories, they also leave with a sigh of relief that world, to immerse themselves in jobs that really interest them and that, similarly, have their eyes nothing to do with the things studied in the morning. The drama of our school system, rather than by ministers (even from them, of course!), depends on this sad oscillation between the long hours of the morning (and in some cases part of the afternoon) employed in cultivating a culture without life, and the rest of the day, dedicated to a life without culture.

In this way the school helps to break up the unity of the person, rather than to reassemble. Not only because it introduces schizophrenia between the pupil and the real guy, but because - with this split does not provide the latter with the help of which would need to find interpretations that unify his life’s experiences. Rather than provide the space for reflection and awareness necessary in order to make order in them, the school becomes one of those experiences -perhaps the least pleasant- further complicating the boy's life.
The solution is to focus on one type of study that emphasizes the relationship between the different disciplines with the everyday life, thus giving "flesh and blood" to each and light to the other.


Educating to think

A second way in which the school, in its specific cultural function, can tackle and help to overcome the disintegration of the subject, is to educate people to think. The thinking is not the same as knowing.

Our school often makes to study the various disciplines without situating them in an overview. Even within individual subjects often do not care about the connection between their various aspects. In most cases, it takes care of the analysis, but lacks the synthesis.

Are not the points of connection because we study the responses without passing through the questions. The school, in the wake of the family, should be taught to think. This is to establish links between their feelings, their desires, their feelings. Thinking is the way to unify. It is significant that the greek verb lego, from which the noun logos, "thought", "reason", "articulate speech" means in that language also "join", "connect". Thinking is linking missed atoms, flashes of life, gather in unity. And the school, if he wants to help young people find themselves in a society that does everything, instead to disperse them, ought to urge before to "learn", to stop, reflect, to piece together the chaotic fragments of their experiences.

 


 

[i] For this overall approach,  cf G. SAVAGNONE-A. BRIGUGLIA, Il coraggio di educare, LDC, Torino-Leumann) 2009 (reissued in 2010), to which we would like to return.

[ii]  F. NIETZSCHE, Crepuscolo degli idoli, Mondadori, Milano 1975, 72.

[iii] R. BRAIDOTTI, «La molteplicità: un’etica per la nostra epoca, oppure meglio cyborg chedea», in D. J. HARAWAY, Manifesto cyborg. Donne, tecnologie e biopolitiche del corpo, a cura di L. Borghi, Feltrinelli, Milano 1995, 23

Giuseppe Savagnone
Director of the Diocesan Centre
for the ministry of culture
Via Francesco Ferrara, 8 - 90141 Palermo