SCHOOL and BEAUTY

 

"What does beauty have to do with it

with the school?

 The purpose of life is not survival but beauty.

It is clear that things struggle to survive, what is surprising is that the struggle aims at beauty.

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- by Alessandro D'Avenia

 

A few days ago it became clear to me once again in a small square in Milan: the first blooms were already shining on the branches of some magnolias, in a still winter light. It wasn't an anomaly. Many stopped to admire, seized by that desire that beauty awakens because, beauty being a complete life, it reminds us that we are made for this: to fulfill ourselves in the time and in the world given to us. Beauty asks: where are you with the gifts of life? And if beauty is the aim of life, it should also be the aim of education which is to help life grow.

Does it happen in the place designated, after the family, for this: the school? There you should discover your own uniqueness and then bring it to fruition by searching in the world and in time for what serves the purpose. Yet, the «XXI Profile of graduates» presented on 29 February by AlmaDiploma , already analyzed on these pages, reports that one in two young people say they have the wrong school and university address. Inevitable outcome of an orientation that is almost absent in lower and upper secondary schools. You leave middle school and high school possessing skills, but not yourself. And without this you cannot be happy. Why?

In a world where the criterion of happiness is efficiency, what matters is to acquire "spendable" skills at work as soon as possible.

Being "spendable" means being "purchasable", that is, becoming a "resource" ourselves to be "exhausted": this means resource, and unfortunately we have decided that people are human resources.

Instead, happiness depends on the depth of relationships we have with the world and with others: our happy memories in fact concern what we have created with our attitudes and the significant relationships we have formed. If I don't know who I am and who I'm with, skills are just clothes on a mannequin.

Orientation should serve to discover one's talents and then make them flourish for the benefit of others over time, thanks to land and gardeners chosen because they are suitable for those characteristics, such as the magnolias that attract passers-by to stop and children to play. Not knowing themselves (i.e. not being recognized by those who educate them), children rely on fleeting impressions, majority choices, family expectations. One cannot not choose but if one does not have the energy and courage of a vocation, one chooses what seems most certain, comfortable, safe, thus giving up one's own specific beauty. This is why many kids find themselves in lives that are not theirs, with the sense of guilt and anxiety typical of a culture of perfection and performance. Unlike those magnolias who do what they are called to do in the time they need, right in the middle of traffic, we risk being swallowed up by that traffic: a world that tells us how to be and what to do before allowing us to discover who we are and for whom. Can a magnolia be happy when asked to bear pears or to flower in all seasons? It will come into contradiction with itself , it will be exploited (deprived of its fruits) and it will wither.

With the aim of providing orientation in the school, the figure of the tutor teacher was introduced this year. It is a first step, but a 20-hour online training cannot be enough for the patient educational work necessary to discover the uniqueness of a child. You don't become a gardener in 20 hours and man is more complex than a magnolia. A few days ago I read the interview with the footballer Rafa Leão , for whom I have a very partial footballing sympathy, who spoke about his childhood in Lisbon: «the ball is always at my feet in a very working-class neighbourhood, most of its inhabitants are immigrants, many from Africa. Not an easy place. The good thing was that there was football there, I played with it from morning to night. Entire afternoons in the supermarket car park. Often it was crumpled up papers or a can or bottle used as a ball, while a car was the goal. My way of playing is still the same, street football, made up of feints, shots and cunning." That child, like every child, had a vocation that would have made him happy: «God gave me a gift and I am grateful to him. My job is to play football, I fulfilled my childhood dream. How could I not smile?". And that child continues to look for beauty and joy: «I love beautiful goals. Football today is just statistics, figures. And I don't like it. Football is magic, joy. It makes me angry that people only think about numbers. I'm not like that. Because people have to have fun. So I have to have fun too. I'm for beauty." But without what his family and first teachers did for him, that talent would have gone to waste.

 The levels of life speak different dialects but the language is the same: the talent of the footballer and that of the magnolias are gifts given to individuals for the benefit of the world. I discovered that the magnolias in that square are called soulangeane , a species whose white, pink and purple flowers bloom while the branches of the other trees are still bare. Their name comes from an officer of the Napoleonic army, Étienne Soulange -Bodin (1774–1846), who created the hybrid from two Chinese varieties in the campaign to which he dedicated the second part of his life, becoming a famous botanist. A man who had wasted time in military campaigns was then able to return to the actual campaigns, his vocation, and that of every man: to create beauty. Today we think of a person in training as a machine on which to install increasingly updated and faster software; instead, we are more similar to plants which, with their intrinsic and specific energy, create, without haste or delay, the beauty to which they are called. And they do not do it in competition (competence and competition have the same root and will therefore have the same fruits: everyone fights to emerge but we know that those who are already advantaged will succeed), but in collaboration (working together: each one emerges for his uniqueness which makes him makes it necessary to others, which it in turn needs).

Cooperation is for me one of the most interesting chapters of recent botany, developed in recent years by the studies of Suzanne Simard who has rewritten the competitive paradigm in the evolution of plants (I recommend the TedTalk «How trees talk to each other » of 2016 and his book The mother tree ): when the tree of a group is threatened or becomes ill, the other specimens, even of different species, exchange not only aerial information via diffusible hormones but above all nutrients through l the immense network of their roots. Trees are not first and foremost individual actors competing for resources, but a collaborative system, with some trees which due to their age have a central role in the birth and life of the youngest ones. This system is defined by Simard as « intelligence of the forest ». Until the school has this intelligence, it will only use the language of usefulness and efficiency (performance, credits, debts, skills...) and not of life (growth, maturation, cooperation, vocation...) its « shoots" will often wither before "maturity" instead of becoming beautiful like the magnolias which, even on busy and polluted asphalt, push us to stop and breathe and ask ourselves why and for whom we are here.

 

He rolls his eyes towards the sky