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Educating under the
Shadow of
Neo-Fascism (part one) By Gianluigi Gugliermetto 10/24/2025 |
Years ago, I translated into Italian one of the lesser-known — but no less important — books penned by Matthew Fox. Its original title is The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human. We called it in Italian simply Educare alla meraviglia (“teaching through wonder”) because the original acronym, A.W.E. — meaning Ancestral Wisdom Education — would get lost in translation. |
Last year, I learned from the director of the publishing house that this book is a best-seller for them. She said that it was a word-of-mouth chain among teachers that made it so. Last month, I received an email from a woman I met years ago at a Creation Spirituality event. Paola — this is her
name — told me that she just graduated in Religious Studies with a Master’s thesis based on the book itself. |
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So, last week, I convened a group of four women, including Paola — all teachers and pedagogues — to talk about her thesis and to see if some interventions in Italian schools could be organized. We could — for example — contact some teachers’ networks to propose a collaboration based on the contents of the A.W.E. book. Yes, the book Educare alla meraviglia is popular, but still in small grassroots circles. The situation is desperate in the main because students of all grades in Italy are pressured to perform, and they are not educated to get in contact with nature or with their emotions. “There is no time” is the mantra. |
Matthew Fox discusses his book, The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education; Reinventing the Human, in the context of current challenges to education. YELLAWE | The massive use of digital
screens is raising a generation of people even more disconnected from their bodies than the previous ones. Put that together with the tradition of authoritarian pedagogy strongly embedded in the Italian state school system — Montessori was |
the revolutionary exception, not the rule — and you get the recipe for a disaster. As Vanna Iori wrote on Avvenire — the Italian Catholic bishops’ newspaper — a few days ago: There is a time for everything. And the time of early childhood is the time of the body… Children must be able to play without
being interrupted, without each of their life-moments becoming digitalized and “shared”. They have the right to an incarnate, real, alive infancy. I learned just through this article — to my horror and dismay — that “digital education” has been anticipated and introduced into pre-school. Iori continues saying: Children need time. They need slowness. Hands dirty with sand, collected rocks, invented stories, and makeshift constructions. They need grown-ups who know how to wait, observe, and marvel. They need a gaze which does not evaluate, but accompanies. |
The problem is not just with the school, but with families who feel that everything is fine when the child is quiet in front of a screen. And it’s a whole civilization problem, as in the course of a few decades we moved from children freely roaming in their neighborhood to a |
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strict family control of all their numerous and often competitive activities. Matt’s book The A.W.E. Project is not just about children — as we will see in my next DM — yet it is in early infancy and up to puberty that the most damages are done. And where the most hope resides. Being confronted — as we are today — with the onset of new fascist regimes is hard. The U.S.A. and Italy are living through a parallel — even if by no means identical — phase of this kind. We want immediate relief from the absurdities that are happening. But in the long run, we stand no hope unless our children are educated to awe and wonder, to creativity, and to wisdom. |
Queries for Contemplation Do you see any parallel between the pedagogical situation in Italy and that of
the countries where you live? How can you be involved in positive change on this matter? |
Responses are welcomed. To add your comment, or read other comments and enter into dialogue, please click HERE to go to our website and scroll down to the Comments field. |
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