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Diary from the Italian Countryside, part 2 By Gianluigi Gugliermetto 3/14/2026 |
Even though I live in the countryside, I am not becoming a misanthrope. Four days a week, I drive to the nearby city. Serendipitously, a job was carved out for me there: the high school students who are “suspended” from their classes due to misbehaving are each to spend time with me, instead of staying at
home for two days. |
It is then that the entire world crashes on me. The amount of pain is excruciating. One girl lives with two mentally ill parents; another girl has many siblings, and nobody notices whether she gets home or not at night. One boy cannot sit in class for |
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more than 10
minutes, and another talks incessantly about his dead parents. And so on and so forth. The school sweeps its residues toward my corner, and I welcome them. I feel one of them, in many ways. Unfit for this world of violence and hate and success and fake happy profiles, but in contact with the pain of the world. The school does not have any hope that my program will produce any good results. The education ministry has simply imposed that the suspended students will not stay at home but be in school, and I was the only teacher available to work with them. Box checked, the school is compliant. Several of my colleagues, as well as the principal, are strongly convinced that the suspension program should be understood as a punishment. Therefore, when they see that the program starts with me offering a cappuccino to the “bad” student, they scoff away, and at times, they even confront me. “What kind of a punishment is this?” they
say. |
Dr. Roger Banks of the Royal College of Psychiatrists speaks about the importance of the therapeutic alliance in helping students with learning disabilties. General Medical Council | I like the confrontation, however, because it is an occasion for me to explain that the binary punishment-reward is not even good for training dogs. Very few have heard the idea of “therapeutic alliance” or the need to create an atmosphere of trust. All that many of us teachers hope
fervently and |
hopelessly
is that students will stop breaking the rules. But I don’t see much reflection on why students break the rules or — God forbid! — on the rules themselves. The re-education aspect, which I am supposed to enforce, consists of the students writing down the school regulations in their own handwriting, plus being scolded by the
occasional teacher passing by our desk, and writing apology letters to the teachers. I feel plunged into the 19th century all at once, a feeling compounded by the fact that the building is from that era. Not all is so bad. I am making alliances with some colleagues who are able to feel the pain of the young and don’t treat
it lightly, while at the same time not allowing it to become an excuse for them to stop trying to live. It is a thin line to walk on. Also, there are colleagues who come to me to share their troubles in class. Recently, I said to one of them, “And, have you tried to tell your students how you feel in such and such a situation?” I saw her mind literally having an epiphany. In fact, I think that feeling (in Jungian terms) and the via negativa (in Foxian terms) are the only key to the situation. Unless people — students and teachers — are helped to feel their feelings and go through their pain, there is no hope for any creativity to emerge. Every day, I juggle between performing my duties as the institution requires and shepherding souls through the valleys of their discontents, their cynicism,
their complaints, their rage, and their loneliness. |
Adultism is rampant at my school. Cynicism and hypocrisy rule the day. And good people are trying to do something good, often without knowing how. When I feel low, I remember that “God is forever young” in the sense taught by Meister Eckhart and Matthew Fox. Every moment
is |
Matthew Fox summarizes his book, The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education; Reinventing the Human, on which three programs for students at risk were based. YELLAWE |
born in the now; every instant is fresh and new. Even though it bears the traces of the past, it can offer a new insight, a new connection, a new hope. I don’t have any long-term hopes, however, for my program. It flourished like a leaf of grass, and in the same way, it will be gone. But how
could we live otherwise today, plunged as we are in a war economy by the most cruel rulers the earth has seen in a long while? “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our Lord remains forever” (Isaiah 40:8) is a verse that means a lot to me these days. Wisdom shines eternal, much beyond our attempts to embody
her in this world. |
Queries for Contemplation Do you have a present relationship with an institution, such as a school? In
what role? Do you encounter adultism? Do you listen to the young? |
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