Tim Parks - An Italian Education

The headmistress opens her handbag and pulls out her speech. There are various sheets of typewritten paper. And she proceeds to read, as all public speakers do in Italy, for there is no merit attached here to the ability to think and speak on one’s feet. On the contrary, it’s as if the effort of writing the piece down word for word was a guarantee of gravitas rather than ineptitude. I always find it curious that though Italians are wonderful performers in their private lives, in public they actually strive to plod.

The headmistress reads. With the slight spring breeze she finds it difficult to keep the papers in order in one hand while holding the microphone in the other. She drops the papers. The microphone wanders nearer and further from her mouth. The parents’ representative does what he can.

She is reading a history of education in Italy and at this school in particular. The school leaving age in 1894 was ten… School became obligatory for girls at the turn of the century… Nationwide state-controlled schooling came in only in 1959…

She reads quickly, giving the kind of details that might be interesting at an academic conference but making no attempt to have them come alive for her present audience. Then after a tricky, breeze-blown turn of the page, she starts talking more generally about the goals of education today. We have to reaffirm our indirizzi culturali — our cultural orientation — within the framework of una civilità umanistica — a humanist civilisation. They are the sort of buzz words of contemporary orthodoxy that are on everybody’s lips all over the West. I remember when I went to the parents’ meeting held prior to the children starting at the school, I asked what my son would be doing if I signed for him to be exempted from religious instruction. ‘Something similar,’ the headmistress replied mysteriously. Then she explained that all the children who opted out, of whatever age, were put together in one class, some seven or eight out of two hundred. ‘But what will they do exactly?’ I asked. ‘Peace Studies, for example,’ she replied, as if this subject had long been a well-established academic discipline. To my shame, I was unable to hold back a smile, almost a laugh. The headmistress was most upset. What, she asked me, as if I were a naughty child, was so funny about Peace Studies? But it seemed pointless trying to explain my sense of the emptiness of those words in front of twenty parents for the most part concerned, as always, with the quality of the food. I made a gesture of apology and begged her to continue.

Now she is explaining how children’s education is structured in a modern elementary school. For one cannot have, she says, or rather reads, a percorso educativo — a curriculum, one presumes — without progettualità. Progettualità ! Never heard that word before! I ask Stefano what it means. Planning ability, he explains. And indeed the headmistress says that whereas when the school first opened they taught only religion, Italian and mathematics, now they have a full range of subjects to timetable, including, as from this year — and for the first time she reads with a little more animation — Computer Studies!

Ah!

The children by the flag on the balcony are making faces at their mothers and fathers below. Two members of the band have sidled round the corner of the building out of sight of the luminaries to light a cigarette. Brass players, too… The headmistress is just pronouncing the words ‘recent advances in didactic methodology’ when a bus passes, entirely drowning out the inefficient PA. At which it occurs to me that, for better or worse, the most important thing that children bring home from these events is a profound indifference to the content of public discourse. It is important for the headmistress to speak, of course. But who cares what she says.

‘Hope this is the last page,’ Stefano mutters, as the woman once again flusters with her script in the wind, though her hair is majestically still. She waves the microphone about as the papers refuse to behave. But barely has Stefano made his remark than she has finished, without any forewarning, any sense of conclusion. And quite suddenly it is just as Michele predicted. The headmistress takes one step back and the president of the district steps forward to take the floor…

The president of the district is a postman from a nearby village. His long speech is dedicated to a meticulous reconstruction of the district’s decision to support the celebration and sponsor the wonderful exhibition of ‘A Hundred Years of Elementary Education’, which we will find in the assembly hall. But I lose most of this in crouching down to tell Stefi that she will, honestly, get crisps and Fanta at the end if only she holds on. I promise. Then just when I’m least expecting it — BOM BOM B-BOM!!! BUM BUM B-BUM!!! — the band explodes into a rendering of the national anthem made all the more feisty for the twenty minutes of tedium we have just put up with — BOOM BOOM B-BOOM, BOM B-BOOM BUM B-BAMMM!

The parents’ representative tells us the great moment has come, the plaque is now being unveiled by the youngest child in the school. Unfortunately, we can’t see this, because it’s inside the entrance, but he will give us a running commentary. ‘So, yes, the little boy has grabbed hold of the cord. Yes. He is pulling it. Now! Now! Yes, well, the drape seems to be more firmly fixed than expected. Oh. But the little fellow is still pulling. Is it, is it, yes! There it comes! A handsome white stone commemorating a hundred years of the Cesare Bettelone Elementary School! And now for the flag raising!’

The girls on the balcony are busily doing their stuff. The tricolour runs up a flagpole that points forward from the parapet, as if from the bow of a grounded ship. It flutters handsomely in the breeze. The anthem strikes up again. The band go for it with renewed vigour. II Pesce clashes his cymbals in great style. Then, unexpectedly, a second flag appears, not on the pole but draped over the parapet as is the style on Liberation Day: the yellow stars and deep blue background of the European Community! What a wonderful ideal Europe is! Only yesterday I heard that four new countries were to be added, four new stars in a great constellation of political correctness. And indeed instead of Peace Studies what they finally decided to call the lesson for those who opt out of religion was ‘ Osservazione all’ Europa ’ — ‘Looking to Europe.’

The anthem ends abruptly. The priest, Don Guido, steps forward in a fine black cassock and purple patterned stole. He reads a long prayer, then puts the headmistress to shame by displaying an enviable ability to juggle missal and microphone as he whips a phial of holy water from his pocket, unstoppers it, and, holding it in the same hand as the microphone, turns to the doorway to make sprinkling gestures over the portals. Since this involves stretching his arm out suddenly in the direction of the amplifier, located immediately inside the porch, each sprinkle of holy water is accompanied by a sudden sharp squeal of feedback. Unless it was the demons in flight. Though frankly you would have thought they’d have left long ago, out of boredom.

Announcing the opening of the town-hall-cum-school in 1894, the local newspaper could not have praised the architect more highly: ‘a grandiose, elegant modern building, well-provided, especially in the schools, with all the necessary comforts and hygiene requirements.’

He used the plural, ‘schools’, because while the main body of the building, ‘in simple style with ashlar facing,’ was to house the town hall, the two lower buildings forming a ‘U’ around the courtyard behind were to house one the girls and the other the boys. For those were the days when the sexes weren’t allowed to mix even before puberty. It reminds me of the oddity of my own upbringing where we were allowed to mix before puberty at elementary school, when we didn’t really want to, but not afterwards at secondary school, when we did; and of course what one fears sometimes is that one’s whole life has been conditioned by such bizarrerie…