The School of Barbiana: a universal tale

Posted on | September 13, 2009 | 2 Comments

A comment by Tom Burkard on a recent and justified rant by Joe Nutt (on the waste and nonsense generated in the name of Building Schools for the Future in England) mentioned a school he had once visited in Detroit. I hope Tom does not mind me quoting him:

One of the best schools I ever visited was a K-5 charter school, where 598 black kids and two whites were taught in a disused warehouse in one of the worst areas of Detroit. My visit took place on a hot Friday afternoon, when state schools had long since locked up–but every pupil was energetically at work, many doing work that would have challenged the majority of the pupils at the suburban Norwich comprehensive where I then taught. The pupils were all spotless, cheerful and impeccably behaved–we would have died for kids like these.

This Detroit school-in-a-warehouse reminded me so much of the School of Barbiana.

Letter to a Teacher, by The School of Barbiana was first published in 1967 in Italian, and then in English translation, in a thin Penguin paperback, in 1969. It is an eloquent, lucid and quite savage indictment of the Italian education system of the time, a system that pushed the children of the middle classes and the professional classes to the maximum while leaving the children of the peasants and the poor people to wither on the educational vine.

It was this book more than any other that got me interested in education and which, eventually, led me to pursue the career that I did. While this little book might seem divorced – by time, by culture, by the nature of social change since that time – from where we are today, it is still utterly relevant on so many levels. Written by eight boys who were teacher-students in this tiny country school started by the local parish priest, a man who knew well that such children would not otherwise be able to gain an education – it is a straightforward comparison of the fortunes of Pierino and Gianni.

Both are real children, but each is also emblematic of his origins and of his educational chances in the Italian system of the time, and therefore of his economic chances beyond school. Pierino is a son of the middle classes. Gianni is a son of peasants. But while the text is firmly rooted in the specifics of place, culture and time, it is also universal. Privilege and money still talk in education today, and the poor still get a raw deal from the equal opportunity that is supposed to exist in our society today.

The School of Barbiana had no teachers, “….no desk, no blackboard, no benches. Just big tables, around which we studied and also ate. There was just one copy of each book. The boys [sic] would pile up around it. It was hard to notice that one of them was older and was teaching…..the oldest of the teachers was sixteen, the youngest was twelve….”

Its opening paragraph:

You won’t remember me or my name. You have failed so many of us.

On the other hand I have often had thoughts about you, and the other teachers, and about that institution which you call ’school’ and about the boys that you fail.

You fail us right out into the fields and factories and there you forget us.

That opening should tell you that it makes an uncomfortable read for teachers in places.

It is still a remarkable book more than forty years after it was written by those eight boys. I wonder where they all are today?

Postscript – Whilst I would recommend that you get hold of a copy of this extraordinary little book – it’s available cheaply via ABE Books – there is also a copy of the text available online. However, I have already spotted that this text, on a radical Indian education site, has been ‘edited’, for instance to remove a negative reference to ‘queers’ at one point. How much else has been removed, I cannot tell.

The full text can be downloaded here.

Technorati Tags: the school of barbiana, equal opportunity, teaching, poverty, joe nutt, tom burkard

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