I care: feeding the thirst for knowledge

Do we really have to resign ourselves to the moral condemnation expressed in Francisco de Quevedo’s sonnet that so moved and overwhelmed Anna Maria Ortese? “Hello Life! … Anything Answering?” Wherever we turn our eyes or our ears, everything is contrition, a painful moment, the collapse and headlong decline of the world based on reason and law, as the historical jounalist, Joachim Fest, recently observed. So? Hello Life! … Anybody Answering? We are not here to feel sorry for ourselves or drown our vision in a sea of hard-won cinicism.

Forty years ago, Don Milani made his famous statement of intent, in relation to his Barbiana School for underprivileged children: “I care”. I care and I will are two ways of saying the same thing, in the sense that “I take things to heart, I intend to do something about it – let’s do it”. From the abandoned children of Don Milani’s little world to the millions of abandoned children in India, Africa, the Arab World, Asia, Guinea, Romania, etc., the countries generically dubbed “developing countries”, here in broad outline we find the second major global plague after that of physical hunger and malnutrition: outrageous, scandalous, multiform, deep-seated and on the same scale as the first, particularly as regards the plight of female children. Abandoned and doomed to the underworld, millions of children are abused, mutilated, enslaved, deprived of a future and of any right to schooling and education.

As we know, it is not only hunger, thirst and disease that annihilate the existence of these children, but also the denial of cultural food and, above all, of the educational function of proper schooling. Yet, here, we enter into a realm in which elements of judgement prove complicated, in that what we are up against are forms of resistance of various types that depend on the enormous differences between the peoples of the Earth:

gender barriers and barriers of a social or sexual nature, irreversibly fixed from infancy and extending into adolescence, in societies unwilling to abandon closed models and doctrinaire ideals. These are the thongs of the straightjackets that imprison the lives particularly of females who have never known a real childhood and have no chance of changing their way of life as women and mothers.

In brief, all peoples possess terms such as education, schooling, and culture in their vocabularies, but to date they mean very different things by them, things which are far from giving rise to a homogeneous vision of the function of education. Since the essence of a common mode of understanding among all human beings equally necessarily entails drawing upon sources of energy and, indeed, embracing the expressions “I care” and “I will” as obligations - the language of those who who welcome the task of actually doing something - we have to devote ourselves to this undertaking with alacrity.