Magister. La scuola la fanno i maestri, non i ministri

Schools do not print money, they do not create jobs, they do not guarantee happiness, but they are the place where our linguistic, critical, historical and ethical awareness is formed. It is up to schools to educate our boys and girls, who are the beauty, unity and hope of the country. Let us stop believing that the world, as Eliot wrote, is “the exclusive property of the living”, without the dead or the future. Let us instead design a new kind of school that recovers the questioning “whys”, that teaches us to grasp the depth and relationships between things, that allows us to discover the value of the past and of memory and, at the same time, to invent the unseen and the unheard. “Question, understand, invent”: these are the three ‘i’s, the foundations on which to build education. For well-formed minds rather than well-filled ones, as Montaigne hoped, we must engage with the thinking of the classics, which is both fundamental and antagonistic to the present. We can then understand the meaning of Manara Valgimigli’s phrase: “Schools are made by teachers, not by ministers”. For many, this has meant changing the course of their lives, because it is only in the relationship between teacher and student that the energy of education is released. A utopia? A vital necessity. We can revel in the triumphs of technology, but Socrates’ questioning must rebalance Prometheus’s impetus.