We are here to reaffirm the right to education. According to UNESCO data for 2023, 250 million children are out of school. That is roughly one child in every ten in the world. Even though the gender gap has narrowed in recent years, the schooling of refugee children and children with disabilities remains seriously deficient. Those millions of children and adolescents who do not have access to education are an open wound. That means more backwardness, marginalisation, poverty, chaos; a reduced possibility to start a virtuous circle made of development, participation, civil coexistence.
I very much agree with President Draghi, we need to invest in school. I very much agree with what my friend, Miguel Benasayag, said. But what school? What education?
Yes, because there is something unique and sacred in school. It is the way to overcome tensions, to heal distortions, it also involves the effort to guarantee to all that treasure of knowledge that no thief can ever steal, that reservoir of the future that can light the way for all. Malala, Nobel Peace Prize winner, said: ‘Education is the only solution to the evils of the world’. And today the evils of the world are above all war. We have talked a lot about it, the pope has talked about it.
I belong to an ecclesial Community, the Community of Sant'Egidio, which has always been close to children and adolescents in the peripheries, from Rome to many corners of the planet. We have an idea, that is, to fill the cities and the peripheries with Schools of Peace, alphabetisation schools where children also learn peace, the great value of peace, the role of peace and living together. Children today need older brothers and sisters to educate them about legality and peace in the face of mafias, Latin American maras, and the pervasiveness of nationalistic or belligerent discourses. Older brothers and sisters to provide them with civil registration, nutritional support, medical care and then homework help. At school children learn peace, children of different backgrounds, ethnicities, religions live together and learn that in tomorrow's society the real treasure is to be able to live together.
I make an appeal, may the international community rediscover that minimal unitive tension experienced in its best moments, in the immediate aftermath of the war, after 1989, during the pandemic, to guarantee all the children of the great human family that right to education that changes the world. We must break the vicious circle of illiteracy and school dropout, focusing on what that periphery of existence, mentioned by the pope this morning, referring to children and adolescents, can open up on the road to hope.
This is not only in the peripheries of the planet, where minors living the confusion of a chaotic, dangerous context need to be given the normality of school. Millions do not go to school. Yet also in advanced countries, where our young people, more fragile and anxious than in the past, grappling with the ‘sad passions’ described by Miguel Benasayag, and Schmit, as their collective dreams and stimuli fade, need that broad breath that only memory and the ideals of cultural heritage can give them.
Psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati wrote: ‘If everything pushes our young people towards the absence of the world, (...), School is still what safeguards the human, the encounter, relationship, exchange, friendship, intellectual discovery, [...]. Is not a good teacher the one who knows how to make new worlds exist? Isn't he the one who still believes that an hour's lesson can change life?’.
Yes, an hour lesson does change life. A thousand hours of lessons change the world. Let us begin to believe it and it will be true. A new time, with its difficulties and its greatness begins in school and we here want to learn how to prepare it together. Thank you.
translated from speech by editorial staff
