“Dear Professors, Can You Really See Us?”: A Student’s Letter Ignites Debate

"I have questions for all of you, be honest at least with yourselves. Why do you teach? When you look at us, what do you see? ". The letter from a student at the Lugo scientific high school addressed to her teachers is making the rounds on social media. Probably because they resonate with the experience of many other students who attend Italian schools and represent an urgent appeal. "Dear teachers - writes the young woman in the text, posted on the school's bulletin boards and shared on Instagram by the creator and teacher Enrico Galiano - it's almost a shame to have gotten so low as to find it necessary to write a letter, but I don't see a solution ." A scathing opening for a lucid and conscious letter, in which the disillusionment with the school and its system is recounted and the inability of teachers to truly teach , connecting with students and rewarding their work is denounced. The seventeen-year-old author has written, more or less consciously, a true manifesto of youth distress , which has collected thousands of reactions and comments online. And this means that the image of school as a place that has lost its meaning, where there is no passion for teaching and no recognition of the efforts of those who attend , is recognized by many, perhaps too many. In the letter, the student recounts her personal experience with studying and the loss of the passion that animated her at the beginning of her school career: “According to Japanese culture, every person should have an ikigai , that is, a purpose in life, that something that makes you wake up in the morning. Well, I had found it in studying. I did it with passion, almost devotion (…). Then I began to understand, more and more every day, that I don't learn anything useful, nothing is explained to me in an exciting way, I am never rewarded for hard work”. Most striking of all is the denunciation of the emotional distance between teachers and students that the young woman speaks of, which increases the widespread sense of disinterest towards school education. But the opening of the letter also gives us pause for thought: “Dear teachers, it is almost a shame to have reached such a low point as to find it necessary to write a letter, but I see no solution”. Before posting the letter on the school bulletin boards, how many attempts were made? How many problems, posed by students, went unheard? The voice of this student and all the sharing that followed speak of a deep fracture between the world of teachers and that of their students. A sense of invisibility and incommunicability that should not exist in a school system in which the purpose is to educate and accompany. And that instead, too often, evaluates coldly and is unable to listen. Plutarch wrote, in “The Education of Children”, that “ young people are not vessels to be filled but torches to be lit ”. And perhaps this is an aphorism that encompasses one of the central problems of education today: school can no longer afford to be just a place for transmitting notions. It should rather be a human space in which the relationship allows passion to be ignited and one to begin to glimpse one's path in adult life. And when this relationship is missing, learning risks losing its meaning and students risk feeling lost. The hope is, then, that teachers will be able to respond to this sincere and urgent appeal to return to truly "look" at their students and to rediscover passion - so that they can also transmit it to the young people they meet every day in their classrooms. School can and must be a living place , capable of speaking the language of empathy, care and trust.