Letter to a Teacher

The book 'Letter to a Teacher', first published in 1969, was written by eight students from the school of Barbiana.  Barbiana is an all-boys school located in a poor, remote, and mountainous region in Tuscany.  In the book the students describe their school and provide a personal and emotional, but well-supported critique of the Italian compulsory school system, particularly in relation to how the poor are treated.  The book is overflowing with astute insights that provide much food for thought to not just educators, but everyone.  I would highly recommend people to read the book.  I have selected 25 quotes/paragraphs from the book that I found interesting and may provide encouragement to read the book. When the narrator refers to 'you' he is talking to a teacher.  Which number gets you thinking?

1. “You kept them at the search for perfection. A useless perfection, because a boy hears the same things repeated to the point of boredom, but meanwhile he is growing up.  Things stay the same, but he is changing.”
2. “Languages are created by the poor, who then go on renewing them forever. The rich crystallize them in order to put on the spot anybody who speaks in a different way. Or in order to make him fail exams.”
3. “Examinations should be abolished. But if you do give them, at least be fair… What makes you do it? Is it for the good of the students?”
4. “That is the most upsetting aspect of your school: it lives as an end in itself.”
5. “To be a happy student in your schools you have to be a social climber at the age of twelve. But few are climbers at twelve. It follows that most of your young people hate school.  Your cheap invitation to them deserves no other reaction.”
6. “Better an old-fashioned teacher than one who thinks he is modern because he has changed the labels.”
7. “People who get no criticism do not age well.  They lose touch with life and the progression of events.”
8. “You keep telling yourselves how well educated you are. But you have all read the same books. Nobody ever asks you anything different.”
9. “The Cocksure Teacher: Others may have done similar research before us. They must be the kind of people who can't translate their findings into plain language.  We haven't read their findings. Neither have you teachers.
   
   And so none of you has a clear idea of what really goes on inside the schools.
   
   We mentioned this to a teacher visiting our place. He was mortally offended: 'I have been teaching for thirteen years. I have met thousands of children and parents. You see things from the outside. You don't have a deep knowledge of the problems in a school.'
   
   Then it is he who has a deep knowledge - he, who has only known pre-selected boys.  The more of them he knows, the more he goes off the track.”
10. “Schools have a single problem. The children they lose.”
11. “For her, one boy - out of thirty-two - is just a fraction. But for the boy a teacher is much more. He had only one teacher, and she threw him out.”
12. “Children born to others do appear stupid at times. Never our own.”
13. “'I did not chase them away, I just failed them. If their parents don't see to it that they return, that's their worry.' But Gianni's father went to work as a blacksmith at age twelve and did not even finish the fourth year level of schooling.”
14. “So far you have run your class obsessed by the school bell, and with nightmares about the curriculum to be covered by June. You haven't been able to broaden the horizons, to answer the curiosity of your young people or to carry any argument to the very end.”
15. “Let us try to educate our children to a higher ambition. To become sovereigns.”
16. “The fruit of a selective system is a bitter fruit that will never ripen.” 
17. “All you do is keep your eye on the system as it is; but you never really evaluate it.”
18. “Teaching is the kind of profession that attracts many who really don't like it at all. Increase the hours of work and all of them will drop out.”
19. “When university graduates criticize the school and call it sick, they forget that they are products of it.  They fed on this poison up to the age of twenty-five.”
20. “The way pedagogy is taught today, I would skip it altogether - although I'm not quite sure. Perhaps if we go deeper into it, we could decide whether or not it has something to say. We might discover that it says one thing and one thing only. That each boy is different, each historical moment is different, and so is every moment different for each boy, each country, each environment, and each family.
    
    Half a page from the textbook is all that is needed to explain this; the rest we can tear up and throw away.
    
    At the school of Barbiana not a day went by without its pedagogical problem. But we never called it by that name. For us, it always, had the name of a particular boy. Case after case, time after time.”
21. “The theory of the genius is a bourgeois invention. It was born from a compound of racialism and laziness.”
22. “You never asked me questions about such things. On my own, I would never speak out about them. But your young gentlemen could go on asking, with angelic faces, about all sorts of things they already knew. And you would keep encouraging them: 'What a clever question!'  A comedy useless to everyone concerned. Harmful to those bootlickers. Cruel to me, who was unable to be good at that game.”
23. “You were destroying every single ideal I had, with the blackmail power of that diploma you have in your hands.”
24. “Slowly the truth will emerge from beneath the hatred. The work of art is born: a hand held out to your enemy so that he may change.”
25. “A school that is as selective as the kind we have described destroys culture. It deprives the poor of the means of expressing themselves. It deprives the rich of the knowledge of things as they are.”