Posted by Lucio Garofalo – Throughout my career as a teacher I have been marked by negative and bitter experiences, bitter disappointments in work and life. But despite that, I remained a naive and irrepressible idealist. My ideal school is a utopian place, a dream that cannot be achieved in the current capitalist economic structure.
A place where pluralistic and horizontal discussion and exchange takes place, without grades and discipline notes, without a bureaucratic model and institutional hierarchy, without sheriff principals or gendarmes. A context where students and teachers can act together, in a climate of independence and spiritual creativity, in a dialectical relationship focused on the freedom of critical thinking. Therefore, it is a distant and antithetical school in relation to the chesty and clumsy imitation of those business models, now anachronistic and decoctioned. It is an environment of genuine human growth and training, in which the talents and potential of each individual are valued. An authentic community, which promotes the participation of everyone in collective and direct forms of self-management.
Each “school community” (note that I do not use the term “institution”, a “bureaucratic” and bourgeois vocabulary) presents in itself its own characteristics and characteristics as a social and educational community, which must value itself in respect of him. a most unique and original identity.
For this purpose, it is necessary that all schools should not be headed by bland bureaucrats, often ignorant and arrogant by virtue of wretched power, coercion and inquiries mostly imposed and imposed from above, but people who are democratically elected from here below. , or created directly from the living body of the basic community. I am thinking of optional principals, nominated at the base and in an office on a rotating basis, with a fixed deadline. In short, it is a school of direct and participatory democracy. It is a school that recognizes the professional and human dignity of teachers and the freedom of teaching, as a distinct and essential prerogative.
The dignity has been humiliated for far too long, due to a revolting sequence of “reforms” (I’m afraid it is more appropriate to refer to them as “schiform”), ie liberticidal and regressive measures launched by a long track governments, both centre-right and centre-left, that have come and gone in Italy for the past thirty years and more, without any interruption.