The difficult and fascinating challenge of education. Patriarch Scola’s contribution for the International Meeting of the Italian Cultural Project

“Crises in teaching are not crises of teaching: they reveal a crisis of life and they are crises of life themselves.” Once again it is the genius of a poet like Péguy which, blowing away an array of cliches and superficial analyses, knows how to get to the heart of what at this point is recognived by everybody as the educational emergency. A question that has been chosen as a theme, studied and proposed as an educational challenge by the Cultural Project of the Italian Conference of Bishops, which has devoted to it its first Report-proposal (published as a book under the title The educational challenge, Laterza).

Péguy hits the target: where there is no adequate life nothing can be communicated, it is not possible to educate. The Report-proposal has been built and written based on the well-documented conviction that “the current crisis of education does not concern only single problems, but rather the idea we have of man and of his future. Hence, it is absolutely necessary not to limit ourselves to a sector-by-sector perspective on education, nor is it enough to reflect on pedagogical methods, but what is necessary is an anthropological and essential vision of the educational event as such.” In other words, education is a work that affects all the aspects and interests in a person’s life: family, school, the Christian community, work, business, consumption, the media, entertainment, sport… Nothing in man is left out of this work, because it radically concerns the elementary human experience which is made of work, affections, rest.

We have come to the point of talking about an educational emergency because something has gotten stuck, especially in “stuffed” Europe. In some sense the care between generations has been interrupted, the chain of transmission of a style of good life has broken, a style able to answer that desire for happiness and freedom that bites the heart of today’s men and women.

This fact pushes us to change. The first step is simple, even though certainly hard: the person of the educator has to be there. The adult is he who must give witness to the truth he is proposing. It is on the adult that befalls the responsibility to educate.

But once the subject is in place, to what should he educate? To values, is the habitual answer.

Perhaps there has never been a time when there as been as much talk about values as today. But the point is that it is not possible to educate to values by talking about values, but rather by making one have an experience of values. I cannot educate to friendship by stubbornly explaining the concept of friendship, but by making one have concretely the experience of friendship.

Many post-modern thinkers regard the cathegory of value as compromised. Not only do they cast doubt on the values that are typical of modernity, but they even deny the validity of the concept of value and reject the idea itself of a personal subject. It follows that a real educational enterprise (paideia) is no longer possible, but only instruction. The misunderstanding about the nature of values can be overcome by clarifying that they are not a “compilation of asbtract concepts” that have to be applied to life, but rather they are part of man’s indestructible elementary experience, of his/her constitutive relationship with people, things and circumstances. If value is what makes it possible to give meaning to human existence, values do not exist outside man.

Hence, education is impossible if it is separated from the relationship between the person and the community – and the one between both of them and the “ungraspable reality,” as Buber used to say – which is the relationship within which experience takes place, because a value can give life direction and meaning only inasmuch it is effectively communicated.

We understand, then, why the proprium of any educational experience lies, as pointed out before, in the “care of generations,” to be provided in the name of “a heritage to be passed on for new enrichment, on the basis of belonging to a common origin (genealogy),” as written in the Report-proposal. The chain of generations (nowadays stretching more and more often from gran-grandparents to gran-grandchildren) is where the person experiences the primary good of having a relationship. The promise of goodness that a child encounters since birth and in the initial relationships with his/her loved ones — “a basic relational experience which is affective and moral at the same time” — will be later called to fulfillment in the task of communicating and grasping the full meaning of life. Our children do not become men and women unless they are helped to discover this origin. Teenagers and young people, to whom are dedicated torrents of words (as scandalized as they are ineffective) whenever their uneasiness explodes in irrational and violent ways, need to live good relationships in order to learn to do good. In the family as well as at school or in places of shared social life, they must be able to rely on adults who are personally engaged with the truth, the beauty and the goodness that they propose.

To affirm experience as the essential factor for authentic education implies necessarily accepting and re-emphasizing the cathegories of risk and witness.

Education succeeds not when one applies correctly some fixed models, but when he who educates and the one being educated risk themselves in a free personal co-involvement. In encountering reality the one being educated experiences a risk because, even though he perceives the intrinsic positivity of reality itself, he may be hindered in his adhesion to the point of falling into skepticism. But the educator also is not spared a risk, since by communicating to the one who is educated he is called to expose himself, to witness in his own person the beauty of the values he is proposing. One educates– as St. Augustine said – only if he is able to reawaken the “teacher inside.” But in order to do that it is necessary to recognize that we ourselves are children of a teacher and a father, as Gilles Deleuze pointed out: “A teacher is not one who says “do this way,” but one who says “do with me,” in a relationship which is first of all of witness, and then of trust, of freedom between freedom and discipline.”

And again the spotlight falls on the adults: parents and educators are those who, in their concrete way of loving and working, witness to children the truth of life.