In sociological terms, an underlying central goal of schooling is to preselect and stratify children to make success and failure within the system seem reasonable, justified, and personally earned.
Yikes. The more I learn about the systems, the less I want to have anything to do with them. My host dad told me yesterday morning, as we walked his sons and their enormous backpacks to elementary school, that I should seriously consider going to graduate school for another degree because in his opinion I am not only able to but well-disposed to continue a higher education. Too bad I'm not in any way eager to do it. I replied after a quick, wry laugh that I'm not interested in going back to school unless it becomes part of a longer plan, unless I find a craft that requires specialised education before I can actively practice. Sigh. PhD, Schmee H. D.
I just finished watching "Rebel Without A Cause" for the first time (well, second, since I watched it in Italian last night, and again in English this morning), and still find it hard to believe that the teenager didn't really exist before the middle of the 1900s. That's just weird. Childhood, it seems, is disappearing; the ten-year-old with whom I live and work knows things that I didn't know when I was fifteen, and his thirteen-year-old girl cousin, even more. Each day I see the long and continuous battle between being a bambino (boy) and a ragazzo (young man) being waged in and around his small head of fine, varicoloured hair, and I want to reach out to stroke a sense of calm into his heart, to tell him that the coolest thing he can possibly be is himself.
This photograph is my personal tribute to whoever wrote those mid-nineties' pop female songwriter lyrics "Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box / religion is the smile on a dog."
She knew.
Blog on, cara mia. You're figuring it all out.
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