Tim Parks - An Italian Education

First the teacher explains the theme of the year to which everything they are teaching is linked. This year it is difference: difference between colours, tastes, smells, measurements, difference between languages, and difference between opposites, big-small, sick-healthy, black-white (the little moslem boy?), girl-boy, child-adult. Listening to the gaunt teacher expound this, I can’t work out whether the intention is to be politically correct (aware of all the different kinds of person), dangerously honest (people are not ‘equal’) or merely informative.

In any event, the story they have chosen to anchor their theme around is Biancaneve e i sette nani — Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — an excellent choice offering the whole gamut of human emotions and inequalities in just those seven names, Grumpy, Dopey, Happy…, which, whatever the language (Brontolo, Pisolo, Gongolo) one can never remember quite all of. As if to remind us that difference is endless, beyond our grasp.

Warming to her idea, explaining how the Mirror-mirror-on-the-wall bit will allow them to introduce the idea of comparatives and gradations of difference (who is the fairest of them all?), Irma, the gaunt teacher with long thin arms and knotty elbows, guides our attention to the walls (we’re sitting on embarrassingly small seats again, creating all kinds of problems for those in dresses and skirts), where there are scores of children’s drawings depicting moments in the Biancaneve story, including the part where the woodsman takes back a deer’s heart instead of Snow White’s. On each drawing the teacher has written such appropriate things as, Tall-Small, Beautiful-Ugly, Cruel-Kind, Rich-Poor, Fat-Slim, Animal-Human… It’s fascinating reflecting how these simple contrasts must fill the children’s minds, establish all sorts of conditioning, moral and aesthetic, that they can then swim with or fight against (certainly Stefi always has a second helping because she likes eating, but then says they gave her too much because she is aware that it is wrong to be fat).

The parents, however, or rather, the mothers, apart from their preoccupation with keeping their legs tightly closed, seem very little interested in all this, as if any teaching to four- and five-year-olds were a hopeless gimmick, especially if it drags in old Disney movies like Biancaneve . As people begin to chat or gaze out of the window at our no. 1 new swing, I feel a yearning to cheer up poor Irma with some expression of appreciation. Difference and its distinction, I might say from my tiny chair, is at the basis of all human learning and is always to be distinguished from discrimination. It’s what travel books are about. I keep my mouth shut.

But now Biancaneve and the year’s curriculum are behind us. It’s complaints time. One mother is concerned that the climbing frame (floor smothered with mattresses beneath) is not being properly supervised. Then Righetti’s wife, Monica, says she feels that the transition in the morning from the calm of the family to the shrieking mass of children tearing around the play area before they split into classes is proving traumatic for her little Lauretta. Other mothers nod in sage agreement. One morning, Monica says, when she just heard the noise, when she just realised how loud everybody was screaming there in the play area, she turned back and took the girl to her grandparents. Carefully, Irma remarks that she will do what she can, though she has never actually noticed Lauretta looking upset. Now, however, she says, we must hurry on with the agenda. For the main and truly serious business at this first parents’ meeting of the new year is the election, by secret ballot, of our class representative, that vital person who will liaise with the teacher on behalf of the parents whenever anything crops up.

Here is an experience: the election of the Monte d’Oro Nursery School’s Second-Year Class Representative. A secret ballot, of course, implies the need for a properly democratic contest, implies that without secrecy there would be attempts to sway the voters’ decisions, difficulty in expressing one’s true desires, corruption. A secret ballot is an essential precaution where much is at stake. It guarantees that something is being taken seriously. Thus the rules for electing the class representatives in schools, and even nurseries, form part of that complex machinery that Italians have righteously put in place (the endless graduatorie ) precisely because experience tells them that things are normally decided by personal influence and favouritism ( ricatti ), though it is common knowledge that such machinery very often becomes little more than a cover for what it was designed to eliminate. Pilotato is a favourite word in the Italian press. It refers to the way some decision-taking process may be secretly manipulated — piloted — by those with personal interests, a sort of sophisticated technical euphemism for the more brutal English ‘fix’.

Was this true in the case of the Monte d’Oro Nursery School election for our class representative? Was this election fixed for ulterior motives? Not exactly, and yet…

The first thing that must be said is that one of the many implications of a secret ballot is that there be at least two candidates, that there be competition. Without competition, who needs secrecy? And it was here that the election of the class representative differed (something to be taught to the children?), and differed radically (gradations of difference?), from your average political election.

Unsurprisingly, indeed reassuringly, none of those who had turned up for the meeting were eager to take on a thankless role that mainly involves collecting money to buy materials for the children’s end-of-term spettacolo , and then, even worse, getting everybody to agree on the choice of, and again collect money for, an end-of-year present for the teacher, something that may well cost in the region of a hundred pounds, so important a figure and so capable of influencing the life of one’s child is the teacher perceived to be.

Irma, whose long legs, sensibly trousered, seem to stretch metres from her tiny chair, announces, with great formality, that she will now absent herself from the room while we select our candidates, since it is important, she reminds us, that the teacher not be thought of as influencing the choice of the person she will have to liaise with (is she afraid we might otherwise suspect her of attempting to increase the value of her end-of-year present?). So Irma leaves, closing the door on total silence. We all sit on our infant chairs surrounded by those pictures of the ugly old witch offering the poisoned apple. And nobody wants to bite. Nobody wants to be the class representative. Everybody has quite enough work to do at home with dwarfs various. Though nobody, you can feel sure, has seven.

‘Well, somebody will have to volunteer,’ a small woman says, but in a tone that makes it perfectly clear that that somebody will not be her. Indeed, exactly in announcing that harsh reality, she has excluded herself. The pressure grows. It’s not unlike those games where you stare at each other waiting to see who will be the first to break down and laugh, or worse still those open prayer meetings I went to as a child where everyone would wait for everyone else to make a contribution. Finally, a bright blonde brittle woman breaks down and confesses that she is willing to do the job, but only, and she is suddenly quite adamant about this (as if having earnt the right to be), only if she has another person as an assistant, someone who can help her or even take over from her if things get too much. Upon which, another mother, perhaps already regretting that she had not been the first to volunteer (the blonde woman is certainly getting some very warm smiles), announces that she is willing to be the assistant.