The celebrations for the centenary of the birth of Don Lorenzo Milani they will begin in Barbiana, on Saturday 27 May, with a march that will see the participation of the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella. Organized by Foundation Don Milani and the municipality of Vicchio del Mugello, the march opens with an appeal which in its timeliness restores to us the value of one of the most important educators of the twentieth century: "But if you have the right to divide the world into Italians and foreigners, I have no homeland and I claim the right to divide the world into disinherited and oppressed on one side, privileged and oppressors on the other. Some are my homeland, others my foreigners."
Don Milani, your lesson is always more alive than ever
One hundred years after his birth, the lesson of Don Lorenzo Milani is still alive and continues to guide us with his writings and thoughts. We can only imagine the emotion of the participants as they walk the road towards the parish and the tiny cemetery where his remains rest. Here he also went Papa Francesco "to pay homage to the memory of a priest who witnessed how in the gift of self to Christ one encounters one's brothers and sisters in their needs and serves them". He was 31 years old when in 1954 the Prior was sent to Barbiana, to a poor rectory where there was no water or electricity and not even the road to get there. A desolate place where Don Lorenzo decided to set up a school for the boys of Mugello that was open all year round, seven days a week. A school for the least, for those illiterate peasant children who were systematically discriminated against by public schools: out of ten peasant children, eight were rejected. Don Lorenzo had understood how those boys, forced to help in the fields and look after the sheep, were destined to leave state school early, without knowing how to read and write. Deprived of their right to education and speech they could never have a say as citizens, as Christians. For this reason it was necessary to take care of them, helping them to master the basic tools of knowledge. First the word: “give all uses of the word to everyone, because the word makes us equal".
Don Milani, the Letter to a teacher is unforgettable
For Don Milani the poor know what to say but they don't have the word; here the art of writing becomes a generator of ideas and is realized in the collective writing, an activity that Don Lorenzo perfects together with his boys to the point of leaving us that great collective writing masterpiece that is the Letter to a teacher. Published in May 1967, shortly before Don Milani died, the Letter it will soon become the pedagogical manifesto of '68 and will make people reflect on the need to reform the education system, giving way to the battles for the school that will lead to the great reforms of the seventies. From then on, nothing will ever be the same again. The school will open up to democratic participation and to social requests for integration and inclusion of the weaker classes because "if you lose them, school is no longer school. It is a hospital that treats the healthy and rejects the sick. It becomes an increasingly irredeemable tool of differentiation“. Here, to reduce inequalities, the school will have to pay more attention to the weakest because "there is no greater injustice than making equal parts between different” and it will be necessary “to give more to those who have less”. Thus Don Milani shows how much all his boys cared about him.
"If you want to love God you have to love people" he claimed. But her love was also capable of hardness. His pedagogical proposal is in fact rigorous, incisive and always aimed at excellence, in search of perfection. For this he requires complete dedication, time and patience that can only be understood in the light of that " I CARES” written in large letters on the door of Barbiana's classroom. It was an avant-garde school experience, with attention to the study of languages, geography, science, without neglecting the approach to work and respect for the environment; a school where the best helped the less good, in a real spirit of cooperation educational. The experience of popular pedagogy by Don Milani deserves to be known and recognized for its being inclusive and open to diversity, to meeting, to dialogue with each other. Her message remains in Barbiana, more alive than ever, to face the great challenges of the education of future citizens of the world. We will be back on Saturday 27th May 2023.
