Education

Classmates Companions in Everything
Six hundred high school students from Italy and abroad met in La Thuile for the GS Équipe, because in their everyday life, there is “Something within something”

by Riccardo Piol

A freshman writes, “My first day as a high school student was much more beautiful and interesting than I had expected... I would be very happy if I could repeat the first day of classical high school!” A bit below, you find a graduate who almost seems to have written a response, “I graduated this year from a classical high school, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sense of relief I felt that day… Is this school? I had hoped for something different, honestly.” These are the beginning and end of two, among the many, brief messages published in the forum of the site of La Repubblica dedicated to the new school year. The first tells about “all those faces that in the course of the next five years, will be my friends,” and the second writes of “a totally apathetic place.” They impress you because they fight it out with each other, the enthusiasm of a beginning, and the crushed hope of an end; it’s hard to swallow, because it seems to you like a tremendous warning against the simplicity of the freshman. You hope that a young man can tell you everything, but not that he is disappointed; you have in mind the many faces and some stories, encountered just days before the re-opening of the schools: the over six hundred young people of the Équipe of GS Responsibles, and their teachers, who have come from all over Italy, as well as from Spain, Portugal, France, Lithuania, and Switzerland, to gather for three days in La Thuile.

A place where you can say “I”
They’re young people, just like the many you find around in the schools. You observe them while they’re there waiting for the conference room to open, and you eavesdrop on snatches of their conversations, and discover that they share many things in common with their classmates who aren’t in GS–the clothes, the tastes, the ways of doing things–they’re like many of their peers. But if you stay and listen a while, or go on a hike with them, or ask them what they do, you’re forced to admit that there’s something else. Otherwise, how would you explain the fact that instead of enjoying their last days of vacation, they’re here, waiting for an assembly to begin? Or the fact that when the conference room doors open, they enter in silence? And that over thirty of them crowd right away under the dais so they can ask their questions? Well, there’s something else. “Something within something,” Fr. Giorgio Pontiggia said in the first meeting of the Équipe. And you, thinking that it’s too cryptic for them, too adult, have to change your mind, because they are heard saying, “The greatest difficulty, the greatest obstacle to happiness, is the separation of reality from the Mystery.” Miriam, a sharp girl with blond hair, who takes the microphone first, goes directly to the point: “I have understood that the secret of life is being simple.” She is like many who, one after the other, take their turn and ask; they don’t hesitate to speak about their struggles at school, home, or with their GS friends. Over an hour and a half of questions, stories, even letters–testimonies of how the title of this Équipe is already part of their experience: “A place where you can say ‘I’ truthfully.” This means GS for them: very precise faces of classmates and teachers, a friendship that they slowly but surely find capable of swaying their entire lives.

Us and New Orleans
They start applauding him the second he stops speaking, and they keep it up even when Fr. Giorgio invites them to stand and conclude the day with the recitation of the Memorare. They heard him speak about the Beslan massacre, the tsunami, and New Orleans, the referendum to overturn Law 40 limiting assisted reproduction, and the interminable querelle on the Banca Italia controversy. And they are enthusiastic, not because they are particularly keen on politics and current events–maybe a few of them are, but certainly not the majority–but because they have found themselves before a person who took them seriously; who, departing from facts and from personal experience, recounted “what it means for us to judge.” An us that encompassed everyone: young people between 13 and 18 years old, their teachers, and that university professor known by most of them: “It’s Vittadini,” explains a long-haired fellow to the well-groomed boy sitting next to him. “He built the Company of Works,” whose newspaper article on New Orleans they had just read. This us matters, and how! The GS students truly desire to judge life, current events, and their studies. In fact, during the Meeting they set up a permanent editorial office where they could meet to read articles dedicated to the days in Rimini, where they could write pieces about various meetings on the agenda, where they could discuss what they heard and saw, from Rutelli to the exhibit on the White Rose. And if some web surfer should happen upon the spaziostudenti (“the student’s place”) forum, he would see that this desire does not begin and end with the Meeting, but that it is an effort that lasts year-round. There are over 900 registered users, young people whose discussions range from films to the Iraq war, who recommend to each other articles from Traces and Corriere, or who tell each other about their vacations and their days at school.

Getting involved seriously
“Ma che vor dí ‘acme’?” (“What does ‘acme’ mean?”), the epitome of a young boy from Rome asked in his strong dialect. He had invested more than his share of struggle to follow the evening’s description of the religious sense through classical music. That evening, many, like him, had heard for the first time selections from Mahler, Schubert, or dodecaphonic music. But it was worth the effort, if only for the fact of discovering something new, something you hadn’t known about before, and that does not leave you unaffected. It is true that certain things can be difficult at a certain age, but it is just as true that trying to introduce young people to new things, getting involved seriously with them, is not something all teachers do. To hear the stories that some GS students tell, confirmed by their teachers, too, many teachers “don’t give a fig” about them, or even more banally, don’t even try to teach them anything. This bothers the young people, not because they demand who-knows-what right to culture–“I do the subjects they ask me to do” admits a young man who attends a technical high school, “but the Italian teacher doesn’t teach us anything, and I cannot go it alone…”–but because, deep down, it is a way of telling him that if he were there or not, it wouldn’t matter. So then, you understand why many young people are so attached to the teachers with whom they do GS. You see them forming a small group together with the youngest teachers, who might be fresh out of university, or with white-haired ones, who were already teachers when some of the younger ones were still in GS. It is also a friendship made up of ribbing and joking, which, however, wants to encompass everything. You may make fun of your teacher’s shortness, but you’re also very attached to her, because last winter she didn’t take you on the normal high school ski trip, but to a city full of art, making you discover something beautiful that you didn’t know about, but that now you will never forget.