Student stabbed the heart of the school in São Paulo – 03/27/2023 – Vera Iaconelli

The school is for the new generation the test tube of social relations. Each student who enters it represents a certain part of society, with its beliefs, race, habits, gender, financial conditions, opinions, prejudices. The meeting between students, teachers, parents and school staff is the meeting of these differences, never without shock. At school, the clashes of broader social spaces are reproduced, so there is no way to dream of a school free of bullying, misogyny or racism, as it is the stage of what happens outside its walls.

But with one fundamental difference. The school has the prerogative of creating spaces for reflection on reality, mediating conflicts and questioning what is transmitted. Far from reproducing the social discourse without thinking, the teaching community intends to be a turning point, a space for questioning.

Hence, authoritarian regimes are keen to control schools, as they can call authoritarianism into question. Where everyone thinks with their own head, where ethics prevails, it is difficult to form an army of mandates, incapable of discerning the real from the fictitious. At school, the Earth will never be flat.

Being such a special space, it has high expectations. Who wasn’t thrilled to take their child to school for the first time? Who does not remember the friendships, the teachers, the acquired autonomy? At the same time, more and more children have shown the most violent gestures to the school environment: assaults, suicides and murders. These are epidemic facts in the United States that Brazil seems to want to mimic due to the influence of social networks, added to the recent incentive to use weapons to resolve conflicts in our country.

What is this desperate message that comes in the form of an act, but also a question? When did the school have to deal with what no other space seems to be able to hear?

The school cannot resolve a society dismantled by social networks, violently polarized, which shamelessly heads towards self-destruction. Its limits are as clear as its power. The school is a space for transmission and listening, observation and intervention with the student. It does not dispense with the support of families and the State, aiming not only at content but at socio-affective skills. Students, teachers, employees and parents need to be guided by the common good, against everything that society has preached today.

A 13-year-old teenager stabs and kills teacher Elizabeth Tenreiro in the classroom, injuring classmates and other teachers. This is the time to care for the wounded and mourn an irreparable loss. He was restrained by brave women, jealous to protect others. Let’s not forget that a child stayed in the room to help teacher Elizabeth. Let’s not forget these gestures, otherwise we will be overwhelmed by horror and forget about human complexity.

School will continue to be the place where society reveals its best and worst facets, there is no way to be different. But it is one of the last places that propose to deal with this in the most democratic and humane way possible. We need to ensure that she continues to be able to do so with our support.

Now is the time to stop and listen to what you couldn’t hear any other way. Recovering what is missing whenever the crazy act takes place: dialogue.

An increasingly rare competence in the face of the call to arms, dialogue is the raw material that sustains the school.

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