At the latest high school exams, from Padua to Belluno to Florence, a gesture has been wide that does not need words to make noise: students and students, on the oral test, they chose silence as a form of protest. No response, no voice broken by anxiety, only an empty space, full of meaning.
That was not unprepared, but conscious refusal to participate in a school system that is increasingly perceived as cold, competitiveimpersonal, where the “merit” often seems a solitary race, rather than a shared path.
In some cities, therefore, there are those among the girls and boys have decided to make changes, obviously after calculating the credits and realizes that they are already “except”, to avoid automatic rejection. A choice that aroused criticisms: “It is a half protest“, Some said. But not, perhaps it is perhaps the attempt to use the only public space that the school still grants – the exam – to transform it into a microphone.
More and more boys and girls are rightly chosen to protest against this type of maturity and as a student union we can only agree – says Bianca Piergentili, coordinator of the student network. (…) We have said it too many times: the state exam must be rethought. To date, it is an exam that does not take into account the needs of the student community and its future, nor evaluates the training course made in the five years of high school. With the creation of what is the student curriculum, the exam becomes discriminatory precisely because it is evaluated according to the individual opportunities of each of us. The school should prepare our future, not to evaluate us on the basis of the possibilities had during the five years.
And what did the state replied? THEThe Minister of Education Giuseppe Valditara has announced that from next year, those who make the muta scene will be automatically rejectedwithout if and without but. A hard position, which sounds more as an order of silence than as an invitation to dialogue. A punishment, not a solution.
Do we really think that the problem is those who are silent and not what has generated that silence?
The truth is that this mutant protest tells us a school that often can no longer be home, to be listening, to be a relationship. A school that asks for a lot but returns little, where empathy is not yet an evaluated competence, and where those who stop for a moment are seen as a dimensions.
The silent scene is not a whim. It’s a cry. A SOS launched by those who, perhaps, have not found other ways to be seen.
And then we ask ourselves: instead of responding with the threat of rejection, wouldn’t it be time to listen to that silence? To ask us what is telling us? To put humanity back to the center, not just the numbers?
