The Risk of Teaching

Traces brought together a group of teachers from Spain, Italy, Chile, Kazakhstan the United States, and Paraguay to talk about education and teaching. Here are their experiences

Edited by Alberto Savorana

It all started with an observation made by Fr Giussani during a conversation in the middle of August: “I see in Italy and the world a terrible disarray in education. This is why we must pay attention to those among us who are placed in positions on which the education of others depends: teachers and journalists.” So Traces gathered a group of teachers around a table (we’ll do journalists another time), coming from Spain, Italy, Chile, Kazakhstan, the United States, and Paraguay, to take up the gauntlet he threw down and to ponder education and freedom… and how the question is played out in the sphere of teaching. Here is the transcript of the conversation with those who enter the classroom every day for the most exciting challenge of all: rebuilding the human through the risk of education.

Giovanna Tagliabue (Asunción, Paraguay): Education to freedom comes about for me through what I teach, because in teaching Italian one communicates all the meaning by which one lives.

Francisco Romo (Madrid, Spain): Teaching is a relationship because what I am “passes” into it. So education does not exist unless there is this play back and forth between me and the kids.

Franca Scanziani (Carate Brianza, Italy): I teach Italian in a technical school. The students who come to this type of school do not have a personal reason, but are in a way pushed by their families, who view the school as the chance for a diploma. Therefore, the first thing I have to keep in mind is that for them, school has nothing to do with their lives. This is why, through the authors and texts I propose to them, I try to get them to see the play of the human and to make them question themselves about their “I.”

Bolivar Aguayo (Santiago, Chile): Among teachers, the question of a relationship is never even posed, because teaching is perceived as a matter of form, a role; teaching would seem not to have anything to do with freedom. On the contrary, in my experience–I teach philosophy–freedom has always moved in me from a meaning, because I have been called to a task, and it is this that awakens in the kids the possibility of serious work in their lives.

Chris Bacich (New York): Without freedom there is no education. In the United States, we have training, but not education. Education is that I propose a meaning to you and you acknowledge this meaning or not, freely. It is all the play of two freedoms: I need to have the freedom to propose the meaning of things as I have discovered it, and the student has to be free to accept it or not, in a dialogue. In school, the freedom to propose the experience of reality that I have is becoming more and more difficult. For example, where I work, the school chooses the history texts for me, and this means that education is lacking, because I am not free to propose the meaning, ie, the truth, of history that I have discovered.

Romo: In Spain, this freedom of the teacher does exist. The problem is that in the end there is no subject capable of suggesting a true position on things.

Elena Ugolini (Bologna, Italy): Freedom is not license. As a teacher or the head of a group of teachers who has to bring these students up, I have to obey reality myself. For this reason, I do not say to a student to follow what I say because I say it, but I try to help him understand what it is; if it doesn’t work like this then freedom is done away with. What enables us to respect freedom? The truth, and the fact that you do not possess the truth, but you seek it.

Bacich: This means freedom has to obey the evidence of reality, and since freedom sees reality by means of reason, it has to obey reason, which indicates where the truth lies in reality.

Fr Giorgio Pontiggia (Milan, Italy): Since for man freedom is a stretching out, it does not exist unless it is prompted. What prompts freedom? Something that reveals man to himself. Freedom is not prompted by a discourse, but by an “event,” a fact. In recent years, it has grown clearer and clearer to me that the freedom of the other is aroused by how I live my freedom. So if I am free, ie, if I respond to what makes me live, it becomes a fact that is interesting to the other’s freedom. For education is the encounter between two freedoms. Now, what is lacking today, paradoxically, is not the freedom of the kids, but the freedom of the adult. It is the lack of presence of the adult that keeps the kids’ freedom from moving.

Traces: What you are saying is that the disaster of education is a deficit of certainty in the adult.

Pontiggia: Yes. The interlocutor has a desire, but nothing captures it, because nothing is suited to it.

Aguayo: In Chile, we fought for freedom of education. The law was passed allowing us to use our own educational plan for the schools. But then the schools no longer made a plan and the educational proposal remained ambiguous, reduced merely to a question of marketing, ie, of selling English, computer science, etc.

Pontiggia: The question of an educational plan is smoke in people’s eyes, because education takes place in a relationship. Then the whole matter of freedom has to be gambled to that point, because otherwise the educational plan is the legalization of a greater slavery.

Lyubov Khon (Karaganda, Kazakhstan): In Karaganda, the situation is that all the young people want to study. But as soon as they start school, they lose this interest because no one answers their needs. For me, the education to freedom lies right here: how I live this encounter that has happened to me, because each one who comes to me has a life need to which I cannot respond unless I myself live what I have encountered. How can all the history that I live be contained in the class time in which I teach? I ask for this new beginning for myself, to be free not to make plans, but to love the freedom of others. Education to freedom is calling forth what is in the person and that must not be invented or reduced, suffocated by pedagogical techniques.

Traces: Fr Giussani entitled his most important book on education The Risk of Education. How does the word “risk” come into play; how is it taken into account in your teaching?

Romo: Education brings a risk for me, and in this I must not be alone, otherwise it is ruined by its images. Risk for me is always played out in a relationship with other friends.

Tagliabue: I risk what is true for me and I propose it to others, with the certainty that it is good for them, within the humility of the disproportion between what one is and what one is capable of transmitting. In Paraguay, parents are afraid to be teachers and authorities for their children, out of fear of making a mistake and blocking the children’s freedom, and they do not realize that the greatest respect of their children’s freedom is transmitting what is true for them.

Pontiggia: Risk is the capacity for patience, because what measures risk is your openness to any level of response.

Traces: … to the point of taking into account the possibility that you might fail, that is, that the other could say no to you.

Pontiggia: Certainly! But the relationship does not fall apart. Patience is not lack of interest, it is faithfulness to a relationship that knows how to wait for the journey of the other to unfold. The word freedom, without patience, is negated. The other walks as he is meant to walk and not as you want him to. What equips you with this patience? The fact that you are not alone, that you experience the same patience toward you on the part of an Other.

Traces: A characteristic trait of many teachers is the experience of disappointment, because they have gone through training courses, they have prepared, they came into the schools because they wanted to teach, and they say, “The kids don’t respond to me, they don’t follow me.”

Ugolini: There is trembling in education, because you don’t know what the other will answer, what he will be like. This is why the question “What will happen to him?” is the one that, then, opens the possibility for a relationship.

Bacich: The risk lies in entering into relationship, because education is communicating. I give myself to you; the risk is that in this communicating myself, you might refuse me. In a relationship, you don’t know what will happen because each person is unique. Education cannot take place except within a friendship.

Pontiggia: The risk is that you are faithful to the relationship even with someone who has refused you. First, you are faithful because the hypothesis that you communicated to him, that you are, endures and is a certainty, and second, because you are still interested in him.

Scanziani: A teacher friend of ours recounted this episode at the end of the year. The fifth-year students wrote to their teachers, thanking them for their patience and availability. The thanked the philosophy teacher for having questioned everything, and the art teacher for having taught them to dream and not to stick to reality. This is the mentality. This is why the kids are confused, but in front of some things they react (when you say certain things, in certain moments), then you come in two days later and it is as though nothing had happened; it seems like you have to start all over again, and in this sense I understand patience. From this point of view, for example, having other colleagues is very important. When my colleague and friend Gibellato comes into the class and says to me, “Look, so-and-so said this, the other said that,” it’s a way for me to start again.

Traces: In this context, what does it mean for you to be companions to the students by teaching?

Scanziani: Certainly leaving room for their questions. You go into class thinking you have to do certain things, but then a real question comes up and you have to set yourself to dealing with it. Or it happens that a student comes up at the end of class and says, “I want to talk,” and while everybody–as soon as the bell rings–runs away because they feel like they’re in prison (including the teachers!), you stay behind.

Khon: For me, it means first of all gratuitousness, because it is a proposal, not a constriction. Gratuitousness is being ready to respond when a student comes to you and asks you for something, answering him precisely and concretely starting from what you live.

Pontiggia: It is above all not a question of time. Giving your life for a friend does not even simply mean giving your physical life, but giving the meaning of life. So friendship with the kids is reawakening what they are; this is the greatest friend. In the schools–I see it also in mine–the kids when they grow up remember the teachers who may have apparently been less “big buddies” in their relationships, but were more severe, more demanding, because they awakened something in the students. Then, companionship is a consequence of this. Otherwise, we make the mistake of so many Catholic schools: they do as the others do, and add companionship. On the contrary, either companionship is born out of being or it is the ultimate misrepresentation of education today.

Ugolini: Companionship is in being, and being is the being that math, physics, Italian deal with… You go to school to learn. So what does it mean to give companionship to the kids? It means that the way you explain philosophy or math becomes interesting, and thus you realize that you are their friend.

Pontiggia: What you say is right, in that you reveal to them what they are living. Otherwise, even the religion teachers can go into the classroom and say, “Let’s talk about what you want,” and in this way they don’t bring anybody up.

Traces: Thus it is education to freedom as pure belonging rather than falling into line like sheep.

Pontiggia: When Fr Gius says, “With you I risked everything on pure freedom,” he is saying this, and there he bases the companionship: we are friends so much that I would give my life for you, whom I don’t even know. It is not in a quantity of relationship, but in the revealing that this relationship produces.

Traces: What do you say about the relationship between the subject of teaching and education?

Ugolini: There is no difference, ultimately, in the sense that you educate through the subject or else you don’t educate.

Traces: How do you put this into practice?

Ugolini: By helping, through the subject, to become aware of something that exists. Last year, when we started school, I said, “Look, the topic is not books, but reality. I am interested in books because they explain what we are and what surrounds us,” and the students did not understand. Then the first two days we went “outside of school” for school. While we were visiting a parish, for instance, I said to them, “Take out your notebooks and write down what you are seeing. Writing was not invented so you could develop a theme, but in order to remember the important things that happen and that one sees.” Thus, within the gesture of teaching, you do not lead where you want to go, but you help the student to become aware of the value of something, to read into a word and understand its meaning.

Bacich: Being a companion to the kids means taking in their question as much as I do mine, their need as much as mine, being willing to do anything for their need as I would for mine. I teach history–why is it important? Because the person, without a sense of history, cannot understand where he is now–the past creates the present–and so it is as though the person gets lost in the present because he does not know where the present is born.

Tagliabue: If we don’t start out from the particular, the risk is that education may become an abstract question, so that education becomes either a morality or a leisure activity.

Scanziani: What you teach, ie, culture, is the human effort to respond to what is the principal problem for everybody–our destiny–which is the problem of living, of meaning. This is why I use extensively Fr Giussani’s suggestions on literature, his readings of Pascoli and Leopardi, and the way his sensibility has read what these authors have caused to reverberate in him, arousing in him the question or the answer. This work is fundamental for the subject you teach, and the way to give it new meaning is to compare yourself to it.

Tagliabue: Fr Giussani has taught us where a relationship begins: from the fascination you communicate, and this is why he says that we must always be the best, because I begin a relationship with another if I fascinate him in what I am teaching. This is the starting point I have for making him say, “Look how great! It is great to go into class with her! I like her!” Through my subject, I have got to know you and I help you to be happy.

Pontiggia: I point out the thirteenth chapter of The Religious Sense, “Education to freedom,” to kindergarten teachers and say, “You have to bring up for me people like this. I am not interested in whether they say the prayer to Jesus in words–paradoxically–but that they grow up with wonder at reality and the capacity for acceptance, capable not only to look and to wonder, but also to accept, which is the hardest thing.” Is this clear? School is an education of reason, and thus to educate–by teaching–is to make people understand who we are and where we are: reasonableness, morality as a gift explained in the beginning of The Religious Sense.