Welcome Back to School Parents – 2/6/2023 – Vera Iaconelli

The end of vacations is the “delicious creed” of parents, who now have the support of the school in caring for their children while at the same time having to sustain a routine that is reminiscent of air traffic control. Leaving children at school implies an act of faith and trust in teachers, directors, employees, other children and the children themselves. Will everyone behave well? Probably yes, but not all the time, of course.

Parents today deliver their children to school in a very different way than they did decades ago. Although there has always been tension between educational institutions and the family, the demand for performance and the individualist ideals have led the latter to make a strong mark on the former. With an eye only on the child’s own performance and not very sensitive to the idea of ​​a teaching community, parents have been making very risky bets for their children’s future.

The good intentions that move them —I address well-intentioned parents, of course— are crossed by values ​​that often result in the opposite of what is expected. There is the “neither nor” generation, of young people who “neither” study “nor” work, to reveal with their performance (or lack thereof) a symptom of the push to productivity, the accumulation of disposable goods, “self-entrepreneurship” “, of denialist meritocracy and other pineapples that our time bequeathed us to peel.

The relationship between parents and the school is essential for a teaching community to exist and for it to fulfill its function. The question is whether we are at all in agreement about what that function would be. Because if it is not to create citizens who, with their unique competences, play their part in a society on which they depend and which depends on them, our project is, to say the least, collective collapse. Just as climate change did not have to wait for the next generations to be felt, cases of depression and anxiety, medicalized or not, among children and young people of school age are exploding, warning us that the future is today, its effects are already there .

Parents have never been so welcome at school, I would even say that they have become essential in the fight against the perennial threat that hangs over collectives in our society. But their participation cannot reproduce what causes so much suffering, imprinting an individualistic, self-centered, competitive and demanding character in their participation.

Schools cannot close themselves to the contribution of families either, as long as they do not do so due to financial blackmail. In the “do you know who pays for this here?” portfolio, which is heard from some parents today, I suggest that we answer: the children! They are the ones who pay with symptoms and disorientation when the school body breaks down, leaving them divided and exposed.

Children, in turn, eager to test all the limits to which they are entitled to make sure where they are stepping, are masters at creating intrigues between the different subjects responsible for their upbringing. Taking the side of the child is taking the side of the teaching community, renewing the bet on this small and protected sample of what awaits them in the adult world. If there she does not feel encouraged to face injustices with her resources, it is difficult to assume that she will have the courage to cope with the big world that awaits her. School is not a place free of problems, far from it, but it is the place where you bet on the highest ways of dealing with them.

Welcome back to school, country! Take your proper places.

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