We have to finish the program. We have to finish the questions. We need to work out the averages. We must calculate credit points and decide on debts, as if the end of the school year were a tax return, rather than the completion of a learning journey.
The first to be overwhelmed by anxiety are us professors, tormented by deadlines, formalities, and an increasingly autocratic and self-referential bureaucracy. We are asked to “produce” results, as if we were workers on the knowledge assembly line, to write down our every move in the electronic register, to justify every initiative. Planning, evaluating, orienting, reporting, reporting, drawing up documents, compiling models. And where do we find the time to teach anymore? Those who chose to dedicate their lives to school probably cultivated the dream of being part of a larger community, of being less alone, of contributing to the realization of Article 3 and Article 34 of the Constitution. He did not aspire to be the poorly paid cog in a machine whose shape can no longer be perceived in its entirety, where it is not known where it is headed or by whom it is driven.
Our frustration is reflected in theirs
If young people are increasingly affected by a form of “total anxiety”, that anxiety is partly the mirror of ours. It happens in love relationships, in the family, in friendships: a sort of “emotional rebound” between people who share spaces and times in daily life. So often our frustration as teachers is reflected in theirs, and vice versa. Our suspicion of being ineffective and helpless and alone within the school walls reverberates in their fear of failure. Our difficulty in relating at times to colleagues and management parallels their difficulty in establishing relationships with colleagues. With the difference that students are in a very delicate phase of life, in which insecurities and pressures are perceived in an amplified way and can have more dramatic consequences than in adults.
School today must be deserved
When I was behind the desks, the Ministry of Education existed. Today, however, it is called the Ministry of Education and Merit, which already in the name reveals the danger: school must be deserved, even compulsory schooling, starting from primary school. And we teachers find ourselves in the role of coaches whose task is to increasingly raise the bar of performance (not necessarily that of knowledge), to improve the standards of the Institute and the objectives set in the Improvement Plan.
This is not why I chose to teach. The day I entered the classroom as a teacher, the scene from Young Holden came to mind in which the boy, who has been kicked out of school for the umpteenth time, goes to say goodbye to his elderly History teacher. Holden, a failing and basically sociopathic student, the last link in the food chain of the school jungle, confesses to Professor Spencer that he is sorry for not having studied his subject, he is there to explain himself but also to receive a word. The teacher, etymologically, is the one who leaves a mark. But that sign doesn’t arrive, the teacher welcomes Holden sitting in an armchair with a tartan plaid on his knees and gives him clichés about commitment, study, results. “Life is a game played by the rules, son.” He doesn’t see him, he doesn’t listen to him, he doesn’t understand his need for recognition. Holden regrets having looked for him and before running away with an excuse he has time to reply: “Life is a game if you are on the side where there are big guns, but if you are on the other side, where there are no big guns there’s not even half of it, so what kind of game is it?”.
I will never be Professor Spencer
Well, when I walked into a classroom for the first time as an adult I promised myself that I would never become like that old teacher who measures his own ability based on the results of his students. He is not the good student who is the good teacher. He is the failing student, the one in the last class, the one who makes mistakes and makes mistakes and in the end learns that you don’t die by making mistakes, but at the most you improve. “I will fail better,” he wrote Samuel Beckett in Molloy.
To free students from anxiety we need to free the school, open it up, let it breathe from the bureaucratic micrania that suffocate it, let it air out, put dialogue and discussion back at the centre. School should return to being a place of community and meeting rather than the prefiguration of a corporate system based on production bonuses and immediate dismissals.
Inclusion education costs more
Of course, the school of dialogue and inclusion costs more in human, professional and above all economic terms than the school of disciplinary sanctions, credit or debit points, or even differentiated classes, to which some propose to return. But it is a more humane school, where knowledge can be circulated between those who study and those who work and where the sense of inadequacy does not turn into anxiety.
