Alessandro D'Avenia: "We prepare children to take exams, not to embrace life"

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Alessandro D'Avenia

.

Palermo, 1977. Doctor of Classical Literature, high school teacher, screenwriter and successful writer.

His novels have been translated into 24 languages ​​and in Italy alone they have sold more than two million copies.

In

(Encounter) he talks about love, friendship and school.

Omero Romeo, the protagonist of his new novel, has gone blind due to a rare disease, but decides to return to being a teacher.

He uses smell, sound and touch to get to know his students.

Is there a lack of use of these senses at school?

What is special about these senses for teachers and students?

Blindness forces you to surrender to life.

We live obsessed with control, it is the paradigm of modernity: I exist if I have power, and to have power I have to have control of myself, of the other, of nature.

Sight is the sense that best exercises control, in fact, envy, which dominates social networks, is literally not wanting to see.

The blind have taught me that if you do not see you cannot control, you cannot have power, and that you can only receive reality,

to others and even your own body as a gift.

What about tact? In Italy we say "have tact" to indicate a kind person, open to others.

And today we have lost the sense of touch and therefore touch: we only touch two-dimensional screens and never really touch the flesh of the world: the faces, the plants, the petals of a flower... Only when we touch things do we learn to take care of them .

And the blind know this: to get in touch they put their hands on someone's face and listen attentively to their voice.

Imagine if each of us received a student every day, closing their eyes and placing their hands on their face and then listening to their voice telling a piece of their story.

This is how true relationship is created,

20th century physics has taught us that we participate in reality to the extent that we open ourselves to it: reality is an event of relationship, not of power.

We have to move from power as a noun to power as a verb: to be able to be.

Omero is in charge of the students branded as "desperate cases".

When that label is hung on a student, is it their fault or do their teachers also have some responsibility? woman and falls in love with her, and looks at her with such affection that the gods give her life.

The Pygmalion effect demonstrates that when a teacher believes that his student will do well, even if he has no special qualities in his subject, he will do well.

If you think you will go wrong, even though you have good qualities, you will go wrong.

There is something creative in the human gaze, because that is how relationships work: how I look at you depends a lot on what you will become.

The human gaze is poetic and prophetic, in the sense that it "makes" the other and "reveals" who it will be.

Pedro Salinas, a poet I like very much, says it perfectly in

: "Sorry if I make you suffer in my way of loving you, but I want to get the best out of you" and again "I see the new creature you were".

It sounds like a paradox, but it is the simple truth.

The protagonist of

, instead of taking roll as is always done at school, he asks his students to say their names and talk about themselves.

What changes that small gesture? It supposes the acceptance of the other as unique and bearer of something singular.

Each one of us is necessary in the world because it is unique (no one has a footprint equal to that of another), and that means that we are here to leave a unique footprint.

Saying a person's name and hearing their story is the easiest way to bring out that uniqueness.

What does a couple do when they know they are expecting a child?

Choose the name, and then the mother begins to talk to the baby.

What do two who fall in love do?

They give each other nicknames, almost as if they needed to be renamed as if they were just born, and then tell each other their personal stories.

The secret of a person is in his name well said and in listening to his story, every day.

When we stop saying someone's name right, we stop listening to them.

And so we stopped loving him.

Knowledge serves to heal, not to dominate reality

Is the school today perhaps sinful of coldness?

How could it be warmer, more human?

Focusing on the relationship and the vocation, and not as now on control and training.

We prepare children to take exams, not to be themselves and to embrace life, with all its hardness, starting from the only thing that gives them the strength to face life: the courage of their own vocation to fulfill.

Does a teacher know how a student is unique?

Do you concentrate on him or on the program and the exam?

Omero manages to bring to light that small group of young students who were in the dark.

What is your recipe?

That of any good teacher: take care of the relationship and teach his discipline well, as an opportunity to get to know oneself and the world.

We have a cold idea of ​​knowledge, as something that serves to dominate reality,

while knowledge serves to heal.

What is happening to the school, what illness does it have?

Why do you often find it difficult to motivate students?

Because at the center of the school is not the life of each one, their vocation, their unique and unrepeatable voice, but the training in what society expects of them.

One is not a subject of possibility, but an object of expectations.

We have to go from the assembly line school, which makes the child a suitable product for society, to the workshop school, which makes the child an artist of life, someone who, having learned the fundamental principles of the art of living, he makes it his own in a unique and unrepeatable way, which is why it is a gift for everyone and not a cog in a mechanism.

Parents,

Are we also to blame for the decline of the school?

Guilt is useless.

What do we ask of the school?

That the son succeed (power) or become himself (vocation)?

We return to the essence of the educational relationship, which is to make the student free and not the object of my desires. What is the school you dream of like? It is written in this book.

Omero believes in revolution.

Can revolution be made in school?

Of course, and many are already doing it.

And if we don't do it ourselves, the kids who are rebelling are already doing it, in fact, against a school that doesn't know how to take care of them because it doesn't take care of relationships but benefits.

What is the main lesson of

What do we ask of the school?

That the son succeed (power) or become himself (vocation)?

We return to the essence of the educational relationship, which is to make the student free and not the object of my desires. What is the school you dream of like? It is written in this book.

Omero believes in revolution.

Can revolution be made in school?

Of course, and many are already doing it.

And if we don't do it ourselves, the kids who are rebelling are already doing it, in fact, against a school that doesn't know how to take care of them because it doesn't take care of relationships but benefits.

What is the main lesson of

What do we ask of the school?

That the son succeed (power) or become himself (vocation)?

We return to the essence of the educational relationship, which is to make the student free and not the object of my desires. What is the school you dream of like? It is written in this book.

Omero believes in revolution.

Can revolution be made in school?

Of course, and many are already doing it.

And if we don't do it ourselves, the kids who are rebelling are already doing it, in fact, against a school that doesn't know how to take care of them because it doesn't take care of relationships but benefits.

What is the main lesson of

and many are already doing it.

And if we don't do it ourselves, the kids who are rebelling are already doing it, in fact, against a school that doesn't know how to take care of them because it doesn't take care of relationships but benefits.

What is the main lesson of

and many are already doing it.

And if we don't do it ourselves, the kids who are rebelling are already doing it, in fact, against a school that doesn't know how to take care of them because it doesn't take care of relationships but benefits.

What is the main lesson of

?

The one that each one would have to say to himself: I am blind to life if I try to control it.

Life is given only as relationship and not as power.

We come from a relationship.

Happiness is not something that is achieved, but the good relationship with oneself, with others, with the world at this moment.

Happiness comes from the ancient root meaning fertility, the Latins said of a tree that it was "happy" simply because it bore fruit.

Happy means fruitful and fruitful does not mean to be successful - that is, to force others to admire me, to be able - but to give others what I am and what I know how to do.

Does Omero Romeo exist in real life or is he his creation?

The book is inspired by a teacher who went blind due to a disease like the one Omero has.

And he didn't stop teaching, on the contrary, he got better at it:

by losing control he conquered the relationship.

And when a relationship is based on trust, being flourishes.

Only in this way is teaching not a "bleeding of being" but a continual regeneration in being.

During confinement, classes, by force, had to be done online.

How was that experience for you?

Can the computer replace the personal relationship? We had to invent new things and that is always good, but we only invent them if the relationship with the boys was alive before confinement, and thus the computer becomes a tool at the service of the relationship.

If the relationship was not authentic before, the computer was useless.

I provocatively say that the school was not closed, but that it was already closed in all those places where relationships do not work.

What I consider unacceptable is that it was thought that class hours could be transferred on a screen, as if the aim of the school was only to transmit data to a brain.

If we have thought that it is because we have a very poor idea of ​​school, because we have a very poor idea of ​​man: a brain without a body.

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