Translator: Denise RQ Reviewer: Federico Pepe
I'm as nervous as if it was my first day of school
because for those who teach,
each day is as the first one
because you need to captivate the people in front of you.
And why do I have the right to take
10 minutes of your time this afternoon?
Simply because I hope I can tell you
something meaningful.
Talking about school, everyone has something to say about it
because you may be a teacher or have a wife who is a teacher,
or have a child or a grandchild who goes to school,
and, of course, everyone went to school.
School is taken for granted,
but school is a place
where beautiful things can happen
as well as so boring,
So boring.
To convince one to change paths
and perhaps leave school.
What can make the school hours interesting, captivating?
What can help make the most of a student's talents
so that each child can make his own way.
How can these hours can be meaningful
in broadening their horizons?
I would like to begin with an episode that impressed me:
a long time ago, a girl committed suicide at Termini train station.
She left this note for her parents:
"Forgive me.
You gave me everything:
the necessary, the superfluous,
but not the essential."
After that day,
every time I've looked at a teenage face
and at my children's faces growing up,
I've always kept in my mind that note.
What is essential
in order to enjoy the gift of life?
But what does such a deep question have to do with school?
I will tell you another episode:
about 15 years ago, one of my students, Tullia,
who's now a doctor, an orthopedic,
a very cheerful girl, she was 15,
one of those girls who always raises her hand to ask questions
she urgently asked me for an appointment.
She came to talk to me, she sat down in front of me,
and with her piercing, sharp eyes,
she asked me: "Miss, I calculated
that each year I spend 1,000 hours at school.
That's 30 hours per week, 33 weeks per year,
it's, more or less, 1,000 hours.
with an average of two hours studying in the afternoons.
So, each year, I dedicate 1,500 hours of my life time to school.
Do the math:
3 years of preschool, 5 years of elementary school,
3 years of middle school, 5 years of high school.
That's thousands and thousands of hours of my life.
If they had been meaningless, I would have lost many hours
of my life attending school. Why do I have to study?"
I had to take her question seriously,
I answered her:
"Dear Tullia, school comes from 'scholè, ' that in Greek means 'free time'.
You probably don't believe it now,
but once, only few children had the possibility
to not work and dedicate their time studying,
learning, knowing new things.
But, as all the gifts, you need to be able to value them:
you have to understand what meaning a given gift has;
you need to unwrap it in order to understand what's inside.
That is the meaning of those thousands of hours
that our students take each year.
In Italy there are 7.5 million students
that every morning cross the doorway of schools,
800,000 teachers spend their time with those students
That are billions of life hours
that should be full
of that discovery - this is the heart of school -
discovery of one's self and reality, of what is truthful,
good, and beautiful that are hidden inside reality.
So many worlds intersect in school.
The aim of the school is not to study books;
throughout the disciplines, Physics, Mathematics, Philosophy,
Science, Italian, we get in touch with reality
throughout that assets of work, knowledge, and experience
others gave us as gift
so that we can re-invent it
we, teachers, with our students.
This should be the spirit of each hour of lesson.
This is the reason why at the beginning of this year,
I decided to take my students on board of the Voyager.
I'd have loved to do it for real, but it had been impossible.
Too expensive.
So I simply took them to our gym, and showed them
that extraordinary video clip where the astronauts see
far away on the horizons
a little dot, the Earth rising
And they, instead of starting to measure,
started saying: “What a beautiful thing!”
This question: “What are you doing Moon up in the sky?”, it's the same
as in the "Night-time chant of a wandering Asian sheep-herder" by Leopardi.
This is what I meant to give my students this year again:
you go to school to open your mind to the world and its reality,
to discover yourself.
And through this relationship between students and teachers,
past and present, we can build the future.
Ducati's laboratory "Physics in motion"
I contributed to open seven years ago,
takes advantage of the attraction for motorbikes
to explain the rules of physics.
It was born from this passion, entrepreneurs' passion,
engineers', technicians', and teachers' passion
who know that there is nothing more absurd
than an answer to a question that is not asked.
Every day, we must bet
on the presence of students and their huge desire
for what is the truthful, good, beautiful, their fulfillment, happiness;
this desire of understanding, even though it is concealed.
We must study thousands different ways in order to achieve this goal.
Last Monday, October 13,
we launched a forth year of vocational high school in Ducati & Lamborghini
for students who had dropped out of school.
44 students that dropped out of school
decided to come back to school
taking a course that combined studying while working.
Do you know what they wrote
on a post-it we hand them the first day?
A post-it where they had to write what brought them to this project.
They wrote: 'Curiosity,' 'passion,' 'desire to make innovations,'
'awe,' 'collaboration,' 'responsibility.'
And they were students who had dropped out of school,
who had no job neither were studying.
The famous NEET,
those students who seem impossible to reach at them.
Actually, it is possible to reach anyone
because it exists this great catalyst which is the desire,
and this is what we have to instill.
This is the big revolution that should happen in school;
it can happen without any laws.
Because from tomorrow morning I can go to school with this desire
to discover what's good, true, and beautiful
that are inside of the reality together with my students and my colleagues.
And this is easy,
as easy as opening the window and looking outside realizing there is a sky up there.
(Applause)
Elena Ugolini; Do I need to bow?
Host: Elena Ugolini! Wonderful!
EU: Thank you. Bye.
(Applause)