WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #31 - "WE ARE MADE OF THE SAME SUBSTANCE AS DREAMS" - Paola Perullo (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr) [machine translation]

 How can we respond as professionals, in the difficult task of educating

children and adolescents, to the growing incursion of the Armed Forces
into schools? We are talking about soldiers who, thanks to specific
agreements between the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of
Defense, are effectively replacing teachers in dealing with complex
issues such as violence, bullying, drugs, citizenship, within the
cauldron of the Civic Education project. On the other hand, teachers are
the ones who should know the delicate process of development of the
minds of children and young people and should have the task of
continually seeking, drawing from the very rich heritage of pedagogical
and psychological thought, methodologies consistent with the development
of all those that are human faculties. To address issues of violence or
bullying, there are cooperatives of psychotherapists specialized in
adolescents, who in several cities have activated a help desk in the
schools concerned, available to the requests of boys and girls. Of all
the characteristics that are part of the genetic heritage of the human
species, I think that creativity is one of the most significant, because
it is from creative thinking that critical thinking arises, as it seeks
other perspectives of known reality. Creative thinking is so universal
that those who do not express it artistically can still apply it in
human relationships, in solving social problems and in improving the
quality of collective life. Creative thinking merges with fantasy, with
intuition, with prefiguration, with interpretation and with narration.
In the final part of "The Tempest", Shakespeare writes: "We are such
stuff as dreams are made, and in dream-time and space our brief life is
gathered".
The only way I know to know that I have done my job as a teacher well is
to look beyond, allowing children to "visit dimensions" that allow them
to think that discovering and knowing the world is as beautiful as
playing, and that each of them can add something, because learning is an
active, living process and not a training. Then it becomes essential not
to lose our compass and, while we rebel in the instances permitted by
the invasive planning of military education, often decided by others and
suffered by us, we must return to the books and authors who made us
passionate about our work. In the book "Play and Reality" by D.W.
Winnicott, (English pediatrician and psychoanalyst who lived between
1896 and 1971), about creativity we read... "It is creative
apperception, more than anything else, that makes the individual have
the impression that life is worth living. In contrast to this there is a
type of relationship with external reality that is one of complacency,
whereby the world and its details are recognized only as something into
which one must fit or that requires adaptation. Complacency brings with
it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated with the
idea that nothing is important and that life is not worth living..." And
then he adds... "Somehow our theory includes the belief that living
creatively is a healthy situation and that complacency is a pathological
basis for life..."
If we accept this thesis, we can accompany the kids in the long period
of their growth, helping them to develop their creative and consequently
critical thinking, because rebelling means "thinking without permission".

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