What would be the importance
of being a prodigy of learning,
if we did not know
how to live in fraternity
with our neighbours?
(MOHANDAS GANDHI)

Reaching the maximum knowledge, so much as they consider it a prodigy of learning, does not imply self-sufficiency. I think that authentic knowledge suspends self-referential   attitude. Life is subject to change, for which no day is identical to the already lived one. We must be educated to this awareness.

The sense of events, which sometimes is indecipherable, depends on what we think to be important or meaningful. It happens that somebody attributes an enormous importance to irrelevant events. They are viewpoints. This happens also when we give meanings to the words. Lived words are more incisive than simple spoken words. Situations change as well as words: education is a strong word (E. Morin). Education is not only a term written in the dictionary: it is also remembrance, sorrow, joy that we must transmit. Sometimes a wrong education leaves behind indelible signs, and it is difficult to overcome errors caused by superficiality and negligence.  

The most spread etymology of education is that from Latin educere (to lead beyond): it is the matter of a progressive reality. The subjects of education are many; history has many faces: environments, events, persons, together with the impact that each individual person has with the reality in which the person leaves.

Experience

«The experience, an incommunicable fruit of suffering and its memory, through which the formation of man is fulfilled, cannot be taught in any school and in any course. There are philosophy courses, but not wisdom courses; we reach wisdom through spiritual experience”[1]^.

I would never have caught deeply the meaning of death, if this had not visited me: experience educates, when it enters the most hidden fibres of our being. Then one understands how we live death: we cannot exorcise and forget it. Similarly, when we experience love and dedication: it is much more than to hear anybody speak of it; or to read an exciting book on the matter. Experience is not what happens; we need to educate us to educate ourselves, to go beyond and catch the sense of things.   

If we consume experiences without metabolising them, (interpreting, reflecting, tasting, keeping silence, etc….), at the end we are simply homologated with a style that we have not chosen  and that it may not be fit for us. “To favour the depth of the awareness, a true opening of mind and senses to the datus of fact, is as vital for us as the initiation to the art of explanation and expression”[2]

A lot depends on how the subject puts himself within the totality of his history and on what surrounds him: on his personal elaborations or on what might have acted as a brake or a stimulus. In education, he who has more resources could (it is not always so) find himself in a situation of advantage. if compared with him who lives with very limited instruments.

As a child, I tried my best to act in such a way, as people might not appreciate my good education, because I saw education as a kind of rigid observation of good manners. It compelled me never to utter bad words, not to dirty my clothes and many more pieces of canniness, which only the adults liked. Therefore, I liked, instead, some peers who felt free to be less educated, even if they read fewer books than I did, and did not have dolls. Their faces spoke of free and happy children, because they were less protected and more expert in facing life. 

I then thought that the street educates to freedom when we walk on it without too many defences. We need to avoid falling into the trap that a good education is what protects us from risks. Education is not a one-way journey and we must safeguard attentively the responsible will of the person in education. “He made them a tongue, eyes and ears and gave them a heart to think with. He filled them with knowledge and intelligence and showed them what was good and what was evil” (Sir 17, 5-6).

To recompose

Experience sets us in motion; it is the heart of the process called self-awareness. We must take this path, if we want to be new men/women. It is important to repeat that experience has many dimensions: the happened event, the movement of memory, the fears, the wonder, as well as the dialogue with the other that leads us to a common action or project. These phases are not necessarily in successive order, but they are indispensable today, in this global era, to understand and to face the challenge of complexity. The disciples of Emmaus had perhaps overlooked memory and wonder because of fear. They moved away from Jerusalem just when the news of the resurrection started spreading. They could see only the event that had caused their fleeing away.  (Luke: 24, 14). Jesus walked with them, helped them putting together the tiles of the mosaic. First, he stimulated their narration, not like a stranger; He rather showed the desire of knowing their story and their personal interpretation of the events; He wanted to understand their deepest expectations to see where their journey had got jammed. What was missing? Did they miss courage, depth, or prophetic intuition?

In the successive phase, He invited them to a lucid discernment illumined by the faith of the people. “You foolish men! So slow to believe all that the prophets have said” (Luke: 24, 25). The conclusive moment of the encounter is a paradigm for every educator: Jesus shares his meals with the two after taking them beyond (namely after educating them).

To sit at table with one’s disciples means remembering also their primary needs. It happens that professional educators think that the life of the disciple is simply the life they see in institutional situations, among school desks or in occasional meetings. This gives a very limited vision of the other, at times even a distorted vision. To sit at table, instead, means trying to stop in the life of the other without thinking that the possible solution is already in orderly and well packaged schemes.

Finally, the two disciples regained trust and the courage of returning to their roots, announcing that the Master had risen (Luke: 24, 33-35). The Disciples of Emmaus re-dimensioned their fears: they had a healthier contact with the events, and this made them free men. The life of every person is a mosaic to be re-composed and the educator must remember that the re-composed image is not his/hers. There exists a reciprocity made up of respect, closeness and distance, of listening and waiting. It is necessary to watch over the temptation of wanting to neutralise the difference that disquiets, without taking anything for granted. It is necessary to pay attention to the shades, to the sentences said speedily, to those expressed only with the eyes, without giving up to the delirium of thinking about a perfect education, which does not exist because it is not a system. The limit is constitutive of the human being and it can be an educative space perhaps more than any other dimension.  

To be free, to love

We cannot undergo education once for all, because education is linked to our interiority, which escapes every casuistic. The approach typologies, the theoretical positions, the language and techniques may change, but an education that we do not conceive as a process, risks to become a juxtaposed system.

In the Book of the Exodus, soon after passing the Red Sea, the people of the Lord is already tired of its freedom: it prefers onions and tranquillity to the fatigue of freedom. (Ex. 16, 2-4). The people will not miss food and water; Moses makes them to reflect and often he repeats to them that their murmuring is against the Lord, who will never make them to miss water and food, though according to the needs of the moment. (Exodus: 16, 16). Moses tries to help his people not to locate him in the wrong place and insists on this point, saying, “Why take issue with me? Why do you put Yahweh to the test?”  (Exodus:  17, 2).

However, he understands the fatigue of his people and speaks with the Lord, “How am   I to deal with this people? Any moment now they will stone me.” (Exodus: 17, 4).

We must be patient to mediate: in reality, Moses assumes the mistrust and the disorientation of the Israelites, presenting them to the One who is the author of their freedom.

 Education asks us to be instruments and to act with flexibility and authoritativeness; we must show the way, we must walk together, reminding the beyond; above all, we must love. We must encourage the disciple who is in front of us never to give up, to accept deliverance with all the fatigues that it implies. We must spur him/her to use his/her creativity like the Lilliputians in Gulliver’s journeys. They lived in solidarity and found a way out: to enter the wood even if they risked to meet the wolf.     

We must not forget another dimension: the educative dimension is not a one way journey, “He who teaches learns” (Seneca) The educator is the wise man, the mature man who does not retreat into his own experience, but knows how to wonder and to question himself again and again.[3]

There are elements and dimensions that change because they are uniquely bound to the culture of a group or a people; others who somehow show the way to every human being.

It may be a limit of mine, but I believe that I cannot fully understand the insistence on spendibilità of doctrines that we cannot put in a similar optics. Wisdom suggests us that there is a depositum to be inherited by those who live in wisdom, as the Book of Proverbs says, “…for learning what wisdom and discipline are, for understanding words of deep meaning, for acquiring a disciplined insight uprightness, justice and fair dealing; for teaching sound judgement to the simple, and knowledge and reflection to the young…”  (Pr 1, 3-4).

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