Tribune. The presidential campaign does not mobilize young people, whether they are old enough to vote or not. But did she really try to do it? And how, if anything, could she have achieved this? The task is complex, faced with a multiplicity of interrelated challenges that it is up to young people to take up.
The climatic and environmental emergency is reshuffling all the cards: the benchmarks of economic and social life, national and international, migration, consumption patterns, citizenship, food. It calls into question the perception of the body, mobility, sexuality, identities, intergenerational relationships – in general, relationships with oneself, with others, human beings as living beings.
The challenge is, in many respects, dizzying, as confirmed by the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published on April 4. On a planet Earth, which has become threatening by dint of sending out distress signals, young people are expressing, as never before, deep collective concerns, but also renewed attention to the environment.
Stars in the eyes
Where should you start? How to give back to our youth some stars in the eyes? By school. Because without it we will exhaust ourselves in vain regulating sectors in transition, like Charlot in Modern times, embroiled in an uncontrollable mechanism; because knowledge and critical thought are the best guides in the face of difficult choices, to avoid false paths, fantasies, “collapsed” fears, ostracism and violence; because, as the spelling suggests, “ecology” begins with the word “school”.
The change will be matrix or it will not be. It must be awakened and born in the brains of the builders of the future, not as a series of abstract data or automatic acts, but as a mode of sensitive apprehension of the world. This is neither more nor less than the primary vocation of the school: to provide the right materials for the exercise of critical thinking and for the mind in general. But applied to the construction of a citizenship of the XXIe century, it is a Copernican revolution, because the school does not spontaneously link the fundamental achievements to the fundamental challenge.
We are part of the living and, in this sense, the school must teach the reality and richness of its symbiotic relationships. It must enable everyone to find a place in a society open to the world, in dialogue with it. It must aim to create and stimulate these links. It is a political education in that it is open to other living beings: it must teach and cultivate a politics of the living!
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