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Listen to thisYou won’t remember me or my name. You have failed so many of us.
On the other hand I have often had thoughts about you, and the other teachers, and about that institution which you call “school” and about the boys that you fail.
You fail us right out into the fields and factories and there you forget us.
Timidity
Two years ago, when I was an first magistrale, you used to make
me feel shy.
As a matter of fact, shyness has been with me all my life. As a little boy I used to keep my eyes on the ground. I would creep along the walls in order not to be seen.
At first I thought it was some kind of sickness of mine or maybe of my family. My mother is the kind that gets timid in front of a telegram form. My father listens and notices, but is not a talker.
Later on I thought shyness was a disease of mountain people. The farmers on the flat lands seemed surer of themselves. To say nothing of the workers in town.
Now I have observed that the workers let “daddy’s boys” grab all the jobs with responsibility in the political machines, and all the seats in Parliament.
So they too are like us. And the shyness of the poor is an older mystery. I myself, in the midst of it, can’t explain it. Perhaps it is neither a form of cowardice nor of heroism. It may just be lack of arrogance.
Compulsory school
After the five elementary years I had the right to three more years of
schooling. In fact, the Constitution says that I had the obligation to
go. But there was not yet an intermediate school in Vicchio. To go to
Borgo was an undertaking. The few who had tried it had spent a pile of
money and then were thrown out as failures like dogs.
In any case, the teacher had told my family that it was better not to waste money on me: “Send him into the fields. He is not made for books.”
My father did not reply. He was thinking, “If we lived in Barbiana, he would be made for books.”
Barbiana
In Barbiana all the boys were going to school. The priest’s school. From
early morning until dark, summer and winter. Nobody there was “not made
for school”.
But we were from a different parish and lived far away. My father was ready to give up. Then he heard of a boy from San Martino who was going to Barbiana. He took courage and went to find out.
The tables
Barbiana, when I arrived, did not seem like a school. No teacher, no
desk, no blackboard, no benches. Just big tables, around which we
studied and also ate.
There was just one copy of each book. The boys would pile up around it. It was hard to notice that one of them was a bit older and was teaching.
The oldest of these teachers was sixteen. The youngest was twelve, and filled me with admiration. I made up my mind from the start that I, too, was going to teach.
Children as teachers
The next year I was a teacher; that is, three half-days a week. I taught
geography, mathematics and French to the first intermediate year.
You don’t need a degree to look through an atlas or explain fractions.
If I made some mistakes, that wasn’t so bad. It was a relief for the boys. We would work them out together. The hours would go by quietly, without worry and without fear. You don’t know how to run a class the way I do.
Politics or stinginess
Then, too, I was learning so many things while I taught. For instance,
that others' problems are like mine. To come out of them together is
good politics. To come out alone is stinginess.
I was not vaccinated against stinginess myself. During exams I felt like sending the little ones to hell and studying on my own.
I was a boy like your boys, but up at Barbiana I couldn’t admit it to myself or to others. I had to be generous even when I didn’t feel it.
To you this may seem a small thing. But for your students you do even less. You don’t ask anything of them. You just encourage them to push ahead on their own.
The Boys from Town
Warped
When the intermediate school was started in Vicchio, some boys from the
town came to Barbiana. Just those who had failed, of course.
The problem of shyness did not seem to exist for them. But they were warped in other ways.
For example, they felt that games and holidays were a right, and school a sacrifice. They had never heard that one goes to school to learn, and that to go is a privilege.
The teacher, for them, was on the other side of a barricade and was there to be cheated. They even tried to copy. It took them one hell of a time to believe that there was not mark book.
The rooster
The same subterfuges when it came to sex. They believed they had to
speak in whispers. When they saw a rooster on a hen they would nudge
each other as if they had seen adultery in action.
In any case, sex was the only subject that would wake them up at first. We had an anatomy book at school. They would lock themselves up to study it in a corner. Two pages became totally worn out.
Later they discovered other interesting pages. Later still, they noticed that even history is fun.
Some have never stopped discovering. Now they are interested in everything. They teach the younger children and have become like us.
Some others, however, you have succeeded in freezing all over again.
The girls
None of the girls from town ever came to Barbiana. Perhaps because the
road was so dangerous. Perhaps because of their parents' mentality. They
believed that a woman can live her life with the brains of a hen. Males
don’t ask a woman to be intelligent.
This, too, is racialism. But on this matter we cannot blame you, the teachers. You put a higher value on your girl students than their parents do.
Sandro and Gianni
Sandro was fifteen; five feet eight in height: a
humiliated adult. His teachers had declared him an imbecile. They
expected him to repeat the first intermediate year for the third time.
Gianni was fourteen. Inattentive, allergic to reading. His teachers had declared him a delinquent. They were not totally wrong, but that was no excuse for sweeping him out of their way.
Neither of them had any intention of trying yet again. They had reached the point of dropping out and getting jobs. They came over to us because we ignore your failing marks and put each person in the right year for his age.
Sandro was put in the third intermediate class and Gianni in the second. This was the first satisfaction they ever had in their unhappy school careers.
Sandro will remember this forever. Gianni remembers once in a while.
The Little Match Girl
Their second satisfaction was a change, at last, in their school
syllabus.
You kept them at the search for perfection. A useless perfection, because a boy hears the same things repeated to the point of boredom, but meanwhile he is growing up. Things stay the same, but he is changing. So the subjects turn into childish matter in his hands.
For instance, in the first intermediate year you read to the students two or three times “The Little Match Girl” and “La neve fiocca, fiocca, fiocca”. But in the second and third intermediate years you read things written for grown ups.
Gianni could not be made to put the h on the verb “to have”. But he knew many things about the grown up world. About jobs and family relations and the life of his townspeople. Sometimes in the evening he would join his dad at the Communist Party meeting or at the town meeting.
You, with your Greeks and your Romans, had made him hate history. But we, going through the Second World War, could hold him for hours without a break.
You wanted him to repeat the geography of Italy for another year. He could have left school without ever having heard of the rest of the world. You would have done him great harm. Even if he only wants to read the newspaper.
This feature: Excerpts from The School of Barbiana (1969) Letter to a Teacher. Harmondsworth: Penguin Education. pp 17-23.
