Caffarra Education. I Prefer Reason and Reality to Values and Desire by Alberto Savorana How they enjoyed unmasking Nothingness. There was one exception though: their podiums. These evocative lines of Montale reflect that mentality which today determines people’s thinking and which was clearly brought out in a current affairs program on Italian television on May 8th (Gad Lerner’s L’infedele). The program took its cue from a speech by the Archbishop of Bologna, Carlo Caffarra, and became a brawl, all-in-all a polite one, between a group of Italian philosophers over the word “nihilism,” like people playing thoughtlessly on the edge of a cliff. In the meantime, the audience was treated to images of violence and war flashing on the screen. The Archbishop had set the cat among the pigeons a few days earlier, in the course of his address at the Italian Sports Center. He had raised the question as to whether education as the introduction to reality is possible in the presence of an intrusive culture that denies it, thus launching into a controversy with the “bad teachers,” who use their teaching posts as platforms for cultivating negativity as regards the real and the possibility of knowing the truth which gives things their consistence. The first hour of the debate in the studio went ahead smoothly in a pas de deux involving Emanuele Severino and Gianni Vattimo–the defender of the unchangeable being and that of “philosophy of weakness”–fighting for attention with half a dozen other philosophers. Then something happened. After a short documentary by Renato Farina on Caffarra and the masters of contemporary thought, which had shifted the question from the academic sphere to the real questions of man, the baton was passed to Elena Ugolini, Head of the Malpighi High School, Bologna. She turned the game around by introducing a word–education–that for the following twenty minutes forced everyone–maximalists and minimalists of being, defenders of nihilism and its gravediggers–to lift up their eyes. She did so by speaking as a teacher and a mother, talking about youngsters who do not read Vattimo, but every day ask if all that surrounds them is really destined to end in nothing, to die, and is really worthless. “If education is not an introduction to reality, what does education mean? Convincing others of our opinions and our ideas? Or is there something objective, something greater than us that we want to know and therefore communicate? Otherwise, why should a youngster listen to us?” The way to combat nothingness and the bad teachers is not through discussion. “Archbishop Caffarra and Fr Giussani”, Elena told, “do not start off from negativity, but from a positive proposal: to educate means to introduce to reality and to the truth.” The greatest crime of the “short century” is that of having discarded the idea of education, and replaced it with indoctrination, subjugation and ideological slavery. This is why bringing it to center-stage, as Archbishop Caffarra has done, means taking on the common mentality, that which seemed perfectly described in “prayer for a child” written by the educationalist, Marcello Bernardi, just twenty five years ago for the United Nations’ Year of the Child, 1979: “May he be different from us. May he have no parents, nor family, nor teachers, nor disciples, nor home, nor refuge. May he not meet Conquerors, nor Generals, nor Saints. May he know neither law or order, fatherland or religion.… May the joy of the passing instant be life and death for him. Lord, may he not be like us, and may he, at least, believe that you exist.” What an arid existence! What an abyss there is between this “prayer” of no belonging and Fr Giussani’s words for the victims of Nassiriya, broadcast on last November 18th: “If there were an education of the people, everyone would be better off”! This is absolute positivity; this is taking up responsibility; the other way is denial of the truth, of all bonds, and culpable irresponsibility. “ Our children are growing; let’s help them truly to grow up.” This is the title of a manifesto published, by strange coincidence, on the same day as Archbishop Caffarra’s speech. It was published by the Malpighi High School, Bologna, and the Pellicano Cooperative, with the support of the Company of Works. The manifesto “Bologna is back at teaching” was immediately welcomed by businessmen and men of culture in Bologna. It is a way of supporting the hope for the future offered to the city, but also to those teachers of nihilism who speak as if they had no children, as if they didn’t want any. But a man cannot wash his hands of his destiny, except for brief moments, because our lot is not the one bitterly described by Leopardi, to end up like a “poor frail leaf, far from your bough.” We are made, all of us, for life; we desire life. We need someone to take this desire seriously, and to offer us an answer that can make us live in hope.