In his latest intense book, of a deeply auto-biographic touch, il pane di ieri, (yesterday’s bread), the prior of Bose, Enzo Bianchi, narrates the world, the colours, the tastes, the life and thinking style at the time of his youth. The reader cannot help being impressed by the ample cultural distance between that time and today’s time, in which we live. Yet, they are not separated by centuries, but by hardly some handful of decenniums which, however, are years that have really set the cards on playing. In fact, whoever is at least fifty years old has witnessed the change of the social, cultural, economic scenario not less than three or four times. It is the matter of radical and rapid changes. Aldo Schiavone is right when, with this regard, he says that the future has arrived too soon and that, on the other side, it has never  been given a similar  short time to humanity –humanity here signifies the man of the street- to adapt itself to the emerging newness, re-building a right balance between desires/needs and resources/means offered by the surrounding area.  (Storia e destino, Einaudi,Torino 2007).

The disturbance of human freedom is a proof of all this. In  fact,  the freedom of today’s men and women knows, on one side, an exaltation and a fan of possibilities never known before, but, at the same time, it registers an elevated and striking degree of anxiety, insecurity, psychological blockage, which not rarely produce “burnt lives”. The starting point, therefore, of this reflection on the theme of the education challenge is exactly a growth to the awareness that today’s living has become more difficult.

A boundless freedom

Life has become more difficult because we have taken away the boundary of our freedom. In fact, in the past each one’s freedom was limited/bounded because of the scarcity of resources and opportunities, as well as because of some rigid scheme with which the various states of life were interpreted (everybody knew what it meant “to go to school”, “to give birth to a child”, “to form a family”). Today, freedom has undergone a process of expansion never experienced before, thanks to the products which the technical progress offers us (medicines, cars, more money), as well as thanks to the discontinuity of univocal models of human interpretation. This last aspect is the result, in cultural terms, of the great ‘68 “cultural subversion”.

The new technical discoveries and the partly justified subversion  of the traditional styles have widened the horizon of our human freedom, but this has not been followed by an adaptation. We should know also he fact that he who is offered more is asked more.

To me, this is the horizon in which we find the education challenge,  which rightly we start thinking of today with great attention.

It is true that normally, in speaking of this argument, the thought goes to the youths, however this is a theme that touches the delicate and complex moment that humanity is living and which we can define like this: the alphabet of freedom that today’s men and women have received from tradition is no longer capable to step with the time, thus they grow towards a generalised incompetence of what concerns the defence and promotion of the human in man.

Every epoch has the youths it deserves.

At this point it should be obvious that those who suffer of this state of things most of all are the adolescents and the youths. Endowed with every good, the emptiness of rules and instructions shared at social level, an emptiness caused by the inadequacy/incompetence of the alphabet of freedom of the adults, they manage in their existence according to the model of experiments, which are often inhabited by solitude and exposed to the spectrum of nihilism  (where everything is equal to nothing and therefore it is equal to everything: to study, to have sex, to seek work, to set a “barbone” (a long bearded man) on fire, to trample on a foreign companion up to the shedding of blood….), according to the known analysis of U. Galimberti  (L’ospite inquietante. Il nichilismo e i giovani, Feltrinelli, Milano 2007).

We are all aware that it is not so much the matter of emitting sentences, as rather of a new dedication of all men and women to these adolescents/youths who are ignorant of what is human, iper-affective and touchy, lovers of experiment, stubborn and finally shut up and depressed.

It is obvious that the various education contexts –family, school/university, parish, groups, associations- must decline specific, differentiated education processes.

The following is, above all, a reflection on what regards the world of schools and universities.

«You are of interest»

The educative challenge questions the world of schools and universities at highest level. The teaching staff is specifically solicited to re-collocate the educative relation at the centre of  its professional action, that is, the process of  involving the subjectivity of the one who must, also through study, work hard to become the person he decides to be. The sense of the educative relation is measured by the way in which the adolescent and the youth catch the reality of finding themselves in the area of the teacher’s interest, of his care and solicitude. It is in this area of educative relation that the school and the university, through their own finalities and specific instruments, will be able to contribute efficaciously to the re-construction of the alphabet of freedom, which today is very much needed.  It would be difficult to undertake, without it, a “humanly” profitable relation between desires and means at the real availability of the single person, between needs and desires, desires and illusions. Let us not forget how the market –with its longa manus of publicity and printing- exploits unscrupulously the incompetence of the youths to discern between what obscures and what causes the shining beauty of each one’s personal dignity. We truly need strength, intelligence, competence and passion to counteract the action that  “these unique authentic masters” produce in the heart of the young generations (perhaps not only those).

The exams are never ending 

In its specificity, I perhaps can say that the experience of study, with its progressive rhythm, with its constant widening of horizons and daily confrontation with the stranger in the triple declination of what exists no longer, of what is elsewhere and what does not yet exist, with its dynamics of proofs, verifications, recuperations and promotion, may truly create a special space to elaborate the awareness of the greatness and fragility of our human freedom. 

In fact, study is a true gymnasium of realism: You are you and not a God, you are even nothing. You can build up something starting from yourselves, you can and must welcome yourselves and answer the word and the promise you are to yourself. You must accept the confrontation with others and with the world, you must accept the sacrifice of trial, looking for its path, its style. It is urgent that, in this, we re-discover the asymmetric character of the relation teacher/learner.

Study is also a gymnasium of “breath”. Life is not simple; you cannot omit to live even one of its days and nobody has ever come out of it alive. However, you can and must resist, looking beyond; you can and must trust the future time; you can and must give time to time” breaking the tyranny of the present, of its commandments and its idols. Only its projection into the future, in fact, frees the human subject from the anxiety of auto-fulfilment, today impossible in itself, and allows him to correspond to the authentic essence of the human being, as a being that chooses to be. 

Finally, it is a gymnasium of “thinking differently”, of “thinking with courage”. Without realism and without breath, the existence at the end lets itself to be dominated by the merry-go-round of “by now…”: There is nothing more to be done by now, I cannot change my character, I cannot take away this vice from me, I cannot realize anything good by now, I can no longer slim down; the world is by now destined to a violent self-destruction; it is of no use to help the hungry, the sufferers..

In truth, there are more energies in man than it is normally believed. Let us not forget that each of us, with our personal physical and intellectual reality, has come out of two very tiny cells invisible to the human eye. What an energy we find within the human being!

Finally, this is the challenge to the freedom of each being from always: being able to imagine oneself differently. Nobody is compelled to wed the unhappiest part of self and his destiny.  

It is the same thing as to say: The examinations are unending.

 Matteo Armando

National ecclesiastic assistant of the FUCI
c/o Casa Assistenti - Via F. Marchetta Selvaggiani, 22
00165 Roma