Translator: TEDx Milano Translators Reviewer: Muriel de Meo
FdB: Katia. KP: Here I am.
FdB: Big and fast changes. KP: Very fast.
FdB: Very fast.
What's happening to teenagers?
How do they live it?
What's happening?
KP: Hard to say,
because teenagers today usually described in opposite ways.
We speak about adolescents
by representing their demotivated and superficial traits.
We represent them as listless and fragile boys.
Or we praise them
when we think about extraordinary, out of the ordinary people
and we fall in love with them,
but we fail to channel these specialties within the big contemporary generation.
Should we draw a bottom line from help requests to doctors,
we have to think about a generation of teenagers
that's substantially sadder than the previous one,
more introverse, less prone to express outwards
their rage and aggressiveness.
So they're less inclined to fight and shout,
they rather risk to end up becoming introvert
and quitting their project of growth,
drenched in a gloom that leaves them demotivated.
FdB: An example may be interesting to make us understand.
KP: I think the examples that many of us unfortunately know,
not only those that work in clinics, among our relatives, cousins, friends,
are stories about boys that once were special kids
that were described enthusiastically at the nursery and primary schools:
"That nice little kid, fast, smart, always moving,
all figured out,
maybe a bit too hard to handle;
but you can see their own nature, their own personality,
he may be destined to be rebellious and unsubmissive.
And he may be one of those who will be able
to find their own amazing path.
When this child goes to primary schools,
although he says:
"I want to do this, to study birds,
I want to study animals; no, only dinosaurs;
no, just fishes, I don't like this stuff."
This signal is warmly welcomed
because it means they're all figured out
and they're connected with their predispositions.
Yet once he's at the secondary school, this view changes completely,
and the same features that were first welcomed with:
"Wow, look how much energies, how many opportunities",
at the secondary schools are seen differently.
It gets worried, alarmed, because:
"Oh my god, he doesn't follow the rules.
We gave him instructions that he didn't follow.
He may even fall behind with his studies,
just because he's not able to use the trails
that someone else's has left before him.
So the view turns from skillful to alerted, worried
and sometimes even disgusted.
So adults' view of teenager
can also be like this.
And these kids, that suddenly clash with a view they'd have never expected,
as they were raised in ten welcoming years
of extremely positive regards,
first they try to understand what happened, who made the mistake:
those who came first
and maybe saw a talent, a genius that didn't exist,
or maybe the blames are on those that came next
and are hostile to adolescents.
And so they're indolent.
But all this questioning soon loses its importance
as what really matters in the mind of these kids
is that things went the wrong way,
thus they sure have failed on something.
And they may feel ashamed for this attitude and humble façade,
but also for this failure to keep promises.
Then shame and guiltiness alternate and at that point the pain is too much,
there's no more future.
What happens next is that these kids become more introvert,
they stop to believe that there's a future project
or that it actually makes any sense.
You suffer less with lower expectations, locking yourself up in your home,
also for the fear of showing yourself to the other people
who will note the differences between the primary schools' cheerful you
and now you dramatically show how average you are.
Thus, a total failure of the growth project.
FdB: But what went wrong? Who's responsible for that?
KP: From a certain perspective, it's everyone and nobody's fault,
which means maybe we should start all over by accepting the idea
that both a positive and negative judgment
is in the view of the one who observes, not the one observed.
We have a very serious problem nowadays -
I mean we as adults -
in modulating consistently educational models
between childhood and adolescence.
We are the adults that feel betrayed,
because they've seen a future - I would say assured - vanish.
Sure, you had to do things, to have a future:
a bit of responsibility, a bit of effort;
but then that positive future was not questioned.
Today it is,
and we've convinced ourselves that the future before us
is spoiled, gone.
And we're also adults that experimented firsthand
how dramatic is to teach rules, stick to the rule
with no awareness, "mindlessly", thus with a subordinate view,
a mind that doesn't reason
and that doesn't question the rule we enforced.
And this has determined a burden that we adults put on children,
the youngsters,
by telling them they must be brave, they must be strong
they have to find out very early what their skills are,
in order to be themselves and find their own path,
so that every challenge they are going to face,
will also be an obstacle they'll be able to overcome.
But we didn't consider adolescence,
which, compared to childhood,
contemplate the other, the different, and the unknown.
So, for us valorizing a child
means that we're teaching him the rules into the relationship:
"Do it because I love you.
Do it because I've invested a lot on you, and I know what's good for you."
It's an internal rule, that comes from a familiar environment
that we value because it belongs to us,
but the adolescent, if he does his job well,
is destined to go further into the unknown,
the different, unexplored.
At that point we adults,
as we're still used to supervise their growth,
because we know the rules, we know responsibility,
we get scared, we don't know how to react,
there we go back to the old model fashion,
we ask them to submit to the rules on behalf of responsibility,
in the name of becoming adults.
We ask them to stick to the very model we rejected,
as we saw it didn't work, but we don't have an alternative one.
And we are - while waiting for better options,
by acting like this, we unintentionally dismiss
the possible creation of an opening toward future.
FdB: Given your experience and the number of cases
you analyzed, went through and helped,
what can be done?
KP: Many things, thankfully,
because retreating boys are always a growing number.
Social retreatists are those that lock themselves up at home,
but there are always more cases of mental retreatism,
meant as a mental shutdown,
not thinking at all, so as not to feel the pain.
We really need to start again, aware of the fact
that we're the actors that can make a difference.
The project of giving so much value to children
and then taking it back as adolescents,
thinking that this way they'll be tested
and their attitude strengthened and tempered,
is in fact a suicidal project for contemporary adolescents,
because it means assimilating them to a relationship, to a particolar view
and then suddenly, without any prior warning,
take that support back,
taking away that safety area, the relationship with adults in general,
the closest ones, but also teachers and all adults surrounding them.
This means handing them over to fear,
to solitude and gloom.
Then we have another serious problem
that is a consequence of the speed you mentioned during the introduction.
Changes happen so fast that institutions
are stuck in a very difficult situation,
because it's evident that today we have to modify our knowledge,
we have to create knowledge not the way we approached it,
not the way we learned it at school.
That was a knowledge made of contents, straight linear passages,
made of relations between who knows and who doesn't know,
who has to learn
and so has to receive those contents and learn to repeat them.
Nowadays, knowledge is evidently procedural.
It's in motion, it's constantly evolving, it needs exploration,
it takes thoughtful minds,
minds that experience knowledge.
And here we are still within a model,
those books we talked about this morning that rest high on top of the shelves,
which are not able in fact
to create devices for mind training.
Complex competences can't be trained,
without getting the kids' hands dirty,
and without modifying those tools and making them flexible.
We also have another problem
still about knowledge and how we figure it out.
We adults are grown -
since the technological revolution of writing,
we relate through names with a knowledge
made of definitions, made of casuistry,
of packagings and analysis, of differences telling us:
"We learned this notion"
And we apply this view on everything, even when we give grades,
when we give a judgment, when we do a diagnosis.
So, whether we're parents, teachers, clinicians,
in fact we apply these kids a taxonomic logic.
We tell them: "You're like this, before you were brilliant and skilled,
then suddenly you become one that makes us worried,
you don't follow the rules.
Maybe we can't get along with you, we don't know what you're doing.
How can we supervise this path of yours,
which already has arguments, contents and manners we're not aware of?"
Here we put labels on it,
unaware of the fact that, if identity is in movement today,
one becomes himself,
and you need a life to become more and more yourself.
we need adults
to question the deep meaning of their functions.
It's not a label that can help us through,
beyond the label, we need to think about why it happened.
what's the meaning, what resources can you activate,
how did you activate them.
Last big topic,
huge topic
but we should try to talk about it between adults,
before involving kids.
We condemned these kids since they were children,
in this passage from a formal family
made of rules, of absolute values,
of the affective family, made of relationships,
We gave them an addiction on our sight.
We are the ones giving value,
and indeed when we get scared we take it away from them,
so these kids heavily rely on us
and on our happiness, in some ways.
When we get scared, we shutdown,
we got worry
and we declare that at that point the future is all wrong, all lost.
At that point these boys have a problem at surviving.
But they also feel burdened by the responsibility
of having somehow disapponted us, damaged us.
And it becomes a schism mechanism,
where all subject go their own way,
struggling and in distress.
The most evident example
of this running apart, everyone on his own,
is the fact that since the kids are very young we tell them:
"Find your talent, find your gift,
run fast, decide as soon as possible."
The infamous "I either study dinosaurs, or don't."
The idea that your path must be focused on yourself,
on your ambitions, besides of competences.
Actually, as that knowledge should be co-created,
co-experienced,
you have to consider the others' existance
and enter a project of co-responsibility of knowledge.
So much so that today kids renounce to the project of growth
and to the project of knowledge,
if their knowledge is detrimental to someone else.
It becomes one of the most common risk factors in a classroom,
when it's clear that competition
will privilege someone and dismiss someone else.
You can notice this aspect in the individual,
as well as in groups,
because at this point it's not enough to state:
"We must give space to kids
because they aren't superficial, nor incompetent.
They're strong instead, use technologies, have their own future".
We should begin from this point: it's their future
and ours, as we visualized it, doesn't exist anymore.
But we cannot step aside
and let them deal with everything
because they are kids we raised
to share, to participate emotionally.
Now we have to participate to the building
not only of knowledge, but also of the future project.
It's like if we said:
"It's not how we expected anymore, everything is different,
we don't even know what will happen,
but if we do that together we will get something back."
It's like stating we're not supervisors of the whole process,
but we supervise the fact that it's worth it.
And together we can still co-build a future.
FdB: Wonderful message.
(Applause)