La luce e l’onda. Cosa significa insegnare?

This book is a tribute to teachers. In an original way, Massimo Recalcati returns to question the practice of teaching. Meeting a teacher is like encountering a light and a wave. Ten years after L’ora di lezione (The Lesson), Recalcati returns to the important theme of school. Every teacher is both a light and a wave: a light because they broaden the horizons of our world, pushing us towards the necessary subjectivisation of knowledge; they are a wave because they embody the impact of the student with something that resists, with a difference that cannot be equalised and which, precisely for this reason, forces us to find our own unique style: what has been acquired academically must be taken up again in a unique way, reopened, reinvented. If these two movements of the teacher are not active, knowledge becomes devitalised. Then there is the great chapter on the School, to which this book devotes a great deal of attention. How is it possible to preserve the grace of light and wave in its institutional apparatus? How is it possible not to reduce its action to that of a technical transmission of more or less specialised knowledge, but rather to safeguard its broader educational task, which is to contribute decisively to giving a unique shape to the lives of our children?