The Uneducated Society

From Veneziani

What scares us about our society? Mass loneliness, snarling and distrustful, reluctant to socialize and confront. The disproportionate growth of technology and its disturbing implications, with the growing dependence on the smartphone; the loss of any close sociality and any true sharing. Molecular violence in the streets, in couples, towards women, children, the elderly, between young people, to take possession of a minimal object or to remove the obstacle to our immediate desires. Aggression in interpersonal relationships, for reasons of lack of integration, of neighborhood, of traffic, of precedence, of packs, of public spaces, of psychological fragility, towards teachers, doctors, nurses, public employees, defenseless passers-by.

We could go on forever but all roads lead to a center that we do not want to see or even name: education. The main problem is that we live in an uneducated society. Yes, even rude, but above all uneducated; that is, no one feels the duty, the right, the obligation to educate and to be educated. Everyone believes they are autonomous, self-sufficient, from an early age; every attempt to educate is seen as plagiarism, submission, coercion; in any case a limitation of freedom, a lack of respect for the personality, even that of a child in the making; in short, not a taking care of but an abuse of the sacrosanct rights to be what we want to be.

You can't even try to say that word – education – and you are presented with images of authoritarian if not totalitarian regimes, despotisms of the past or patriarchal, paternalistic systems now buried in the past.

But just as "we are not born learned", so we are not born educated; and a form of self-education cannot suffice; what counts are knowledge, experiences, roles, comparisons and responsibilities. All this gives authority and also, do not be afraid, authority, which we need at least as much as its opposite, autonomy. Indeed, the relationship between authority and autonomy is not equal, at least at the start, when you are small it is necessarily unbalanced in favor of the former.

Education is the great absentee in our contemporary society. Education is no longer done also because shared principles and common horizons of meaning have disappeared. And patience has disappeared, to educate and to be educated. Education involves not only a perimeter of rules and behaviors, but also of reference principles, knowledge of knowledge in proportion to the age, education and intelligence of each person and a constant commitment to the civil and cultural growth of citizens. Civic education? Of course, but not only. Educating about respect, civility and good manners, educating about good language, educating about reading and culture, history and beauty, educating about citizenship and work, nature and the body and some basic principles of good life that also translate into an ethical and moral level. Education is not enough, especially when it is pragmatically reduced to instructions for use; nor is familiarity with techno-practical or profit-making fields enough. Education is a general vision, knowing how to measure means and ends, knowing how to live in a community, being aware of one's rights and duties, as well as awareness of the world, the city, the country one lives in. Educating to love is ultimately the highest degree of education to love at every level and in every field, not just the strictly sentimental one.

But where are the educators? The main agencies remain three: the school, the mass media and the family, plus various intermediate and collateral spheres. All three are in deep crisis. At school they are largely lacking, and are often reluctant to recognize themselves as educators. The media even deny that it is their job to educate, they must inform, entertain, at most instruct and above all sell; and instead their public reference models pass through the media. In the family the primary code has changed: not to educate but only to protect, not to educate children to take on responsibilities, to be respectful, to accept their own limits and to commit to being better, but to protect them, shield them or prepare them to get around obstacles, reject every selective criterion and every severity, always and in any case take their side, indulge them in everything except when they risk hurting themselves. The harmful formula that opposes education is mammism plus utilitarianism = comfort, that is, making one's own convenience. It is not just a home formula, it is basically the general criterion of social organization, where mammism becomes permissiveness and utilitarianism becomes the primacy of profit and advantage. A society is flourishing if it has a good economy below it, a society is sick if it has the economy above it.

The question still remains unanswered: where to find educators? I believe that politics is no longer able to think about these processes; it is only an executive interval of directives to be followed immediately or in its proximity; the important thing is to get to power and stay there as long as possible. That is the Absolute Profit.

To be visionary, what is needed at this point is a great civil movement of education open to all those who are there and have the qualifications to be there: real teachers, active or retired, foundations, institutes, associations, parishes and religious, cultural organizations, scattered managers and scholars at large, virtuous examples. For time immemorial, no more civil movements have arisen, outside the whining of woke or gender catechism, that push towards this great educational task aimed at society.

The difficulty, if not the ambition, of the project is as enormous as the need to try. One project, ten projects. Then ten small volunteers, and a hundred, then a thousand, gradually expanding. And ten small seminars, then courses, evening schools of education, gyms. Until politics also notices it, and there's trouble; or until governments and ministries notice it, and beyond the trouble, perhaps even initiatives and programs can arise. Like all great, beneficial and necessary things that are proposed, the forecasts always lean on the negative, it is much more likely that they will fail or betray. The problem is understanding that without that big thinking, without those attempts to change the course of events and not let them flow as they come, we are destined for the end of civilization. An uneducated society lets itself be eaten up with bites, day after day.