LETTER TO A TEACHER Tuscany, Italy. They describe a school they ran topic was "Make a railway carriage speak"
themselves and explain to the teacher how it differs from the understands. It has become a manifesto for the topic and the people who set it.
Italian schools movement. These are some Dear Miss, of you and your colleagues in the institution men who held the knife over me.
which you call learning, and all the kids you've crammed.
THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAIN ON TIMIDNESS frightened me. And the timidness followed me everywhere I went.
I stuck close to the walls so no one would see me.
At first I thought I was sick or maybe it form. My father observes and listens but hardly mystery.
ever speaks.
Later I thought that timidness was a disease of mountain people like us. The peasants from for themselves. Not to speak of the workersi But then I noticed that the workers allowed studying.
all the best jobs in factories, in the political reduced to marks and nothing more. parties, and all the seats in parliament, to go to pap's little darlings' he poor is a mystery that goes back a long way end it boils down to that n time. Why, İ-can't explain, because I'm sc mesuma part of it. Perhaps it's just a lack of got to be an opportunist at the age of 12. presumption.
ON THE MULTICLASS In my primary school, the State gave me a second-rate education. Five classes were held in THE NEWSPAPER:
ne room. I had a right to one-fifth of a school. I know the history of the last half century bes I've learned that this system is used in America of all. The Russian revolution, Fascism, the to create differences blacks. An inferior school for the poor from the and Asia. It's the history experienced by my time they're toddlers.
Once out of primary school I still had a right But he said to himself: "If we lived in Barbiana, and us as well. he would be good enough".
ON BARBIANA At Barbiana all the kids go to a school run by the point where pupils can begin to refer to the priest.
sut we were from another kind of people, a newspaper in clas nd lived far away. My father almost let wel between his hands, and went to find out about When I got there Barbiana didn't seem like a classes and ate.
There was only one copy of each book. million families.
Blokes gathered round it. 1 hardly noticed that ruined.
Afterwards they learned that some other pages weren't bad either. Then they discovered that history, too, was worth the effort. low everything interests them. They hel each the younger kids. They have become lik us.
THE EXAMINATIONS But I was 14 and I came from the mountains. To get into grammar school. I needed that leaving certificate. And that little paper was in the hands of five or six people, I tried to write the way you like.
The French examination was a false test. Examinations must be abolished. They simply ensure loyalty to an unbearable system.
felt that's because you love little traps and snares.
You make war on your students.
Why do you do it? It's for their own good.
Perhaps they don't exist. Perhaps they're common place.
Day after day they study for the book test, the lowlands, I thought, seemed so sure of certificate, for their finals. In between they- tri-monthly report, for their don't notice all the beautiful things they are Languages, history, sciences, are Behind these little bits of paper there's only They're just like us. And the timidness of worth money. None of you say so. But in the the small interests of each. The certificate is To study this way in your schools, you've The opportunists of 12. Count them. They number most of your pupils. They never get the sense of a school.
between whites and War, the Resistance, the liberation of Africa grand-father and my father.
also know the history of my world, thanks turned us into ON THE CONSTITUTION:
You stopped at the First World War, exactly at their own lives. The whole year you never read The Doctor's little Piero has the time to read need to know if it's Jupiter who delivered Minerva or vice versa.
Better that the work contract of the metal yourself. It represents the very life of some half You say to each other about each other that until old Lardbelly says "Time" and starts emptying the ashtrays over your trousers. You Police State.
can get a really good bike and spend a lot of time on it until you get your bones sprayed Crowther, Bernard Braden across the North Circular or have to sell it to earn it.
But then the gang breaks up, the people who were in the same class as you have babies; Complayin about timmy in the and your complaining about Young and your husband's plates of carbohydrates. Despite the exciting bits, the pleasures of life tend to be capitalist cabbag water: the T.V., radio and odd film. And it's then you stop to notice whether there is really all that much difference between the Old Alabammy Black and White Minstrels and zoomy Radio One Club. It gets quite tricky to tell the difference between John Peel and Kenneth Wolstenholme. It all comes from the Great Musack Machine of capitalism and it's designed to get you to like the present set up and view any other social arrangement idealistic' or 'impossible" or just not worth the bother.
Now at present, atter four years of belt tightening sustain Harold's costly pantaloons, we are still in a major economic crises. Things are getting worse rather than better. Short of mass suicide or the dismantling of council flats and hospitals and their rebuilding into insurance companies, likely to get slightly worse every year. The man we are MAL-DEAN Society is more useful than the crowbar of the Anyone who will put up with Lesle and Robin Day without an overwhelming need to kick the TV , clothes and hairdo's even for a strike, help a squat or read a leaflet. And screen in will have a brain too softened to vote as the political crises becomes more and more insoluble outside revolutionary politics, so the fabric of society stretches and thins and the need for social discipline becomes more vital for them. The capitalist ice is getting so thin that delegates at the Democratic Convention weren't even allowed ice cubes in their cocktails in case they threw them.
What is NOT wanted is liberal lizards in the TV factories, cogs consciences who whinny with radical delight with The remains of when they slip a shot of Socialism into a sea of cabbage water. It doesn't make the cop's boot softer or the Strikes easier, and promises of help from the Media above discourage the revolutionary movement's reliance on itself -which IS all it has.
It's for revolutionaries to assert that there is more to Man than the nozzle end of a cathode tube and the late racing results. That there's more to music than Mantovani and the Move, more to love than truss adverts and fag commercials, more to politics than the midget nonsters in Whitehall. It's just their systen heir apologies, their lies and it's coming apa at the seams. Next time the hand of capitalist cabbage-water culture comes to feed you, don't just bite it, but snap the fingers off.
David Widgery
YOUTH SECTION Tana is not a narcotic May 16 1969
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alone. Then he foud out that a little lad from fables. Not Gianni. At 15 he slipped through San Martino went there. So he took his courage your fingers. Now he's in a factory. He doesn't
school. No chairs, no blackboard, no benches. workers were in its place in Italian classes. Have Nothing but large tables where we had our you read it Mme? You should be ashamed of
group of boys aged between 12 & 14 from. a candidate for the leaving certificate. The essay If I had been honest, I would have turned in kind of education she a blank copy. Or I would have criticised the
You won't remember my name. You've got total strangers to me and my life and almost so many in your head. But I've often thought everything 1 knew and loved. Absent-minded
The difficulties should be put in proportion to Two years ago when I was in my first year, you the difficulties of life. If you increase them
came from my family. My mother is one of ON TWELVE YEARS OLD OPPORTUNISTS: those women who is frightened of a telegram What are the aims of your pupils. That, too, is a
keep the baby in nappies. You can spend a lot if it does take you 90 percent. of your time to
many people get fed up. You can show you are Referee. They know that cultural torpor fed up by smashing up the Victoria Line after guarantees political obedience and that for a Arsenal lose. You gan get pissed and fee great few years more the candyfloss of the Permissive