How to teach awareness of good and evil to young people
Those that were once called bravadoes now take on increasingly extreme and chilling connotative tones but it is necessary not to lose hope in young people, learning to listen to them juggling benevolence and the duty to enforce the rules. The intervention of Francesco Provinciali
The news offers us with ever more pressing emphases episodes in which minors are at the center of contexts of suffered or acted violence. There are fathers and mothers who unload on their children their existential frustrations or more simply their immaturity and parental incapacity: physical and emotional abandonment is perhaps the most recurrent case but situations of physical and sexual violence, chilling and unnatural behaviors are not rare. perpetrated on creatures at a very young age, like that father who recently admitted to throwing his 2-year-old daughter out the window.
The listening experience allows you to know situations ranging from family discomfort to promiscuous contexts where a child is often a cause of disturbance and an obstacle to the delusional abandonment to the drives of selfishness and unbridled narcissism of adults, or is made the object of real acts abuse, often fueled by drugs and alcohol, at other times in the absence of primary emotional relationships, lack of interest or couple conflicts. How much all this has repercussions – in the best of cases – on the educational failure and school failure of minors can be deduced from the reports that the social services or the institutions themselves forward to the juvenile judicial authorities starting from the kindergarten. Behind every case of early abandonment of studies, non-fulfillment of the obligation or behavioral discomfort of the pupils there are causes that almost always lead to the inadequacy of the family backgrounds of origin. This also happens in situations in which children and adolescents in general make themselves the protagonists of fierce and apparently inexplicable violence: these days is the story of the homeless man who was savagely beaten by some minors in the Trastevere area of Rome and shot from videos and cameras. It is not the first time this has happened, scrolling through the news of recent years we realize that these attacks are frequent, like bullying towards fragile or disabled comrades, not to mention the real gangs that rage in acts of theft , clashes between factions armed with bars, knives, even guns: this is not just an Italian phenomenon, there are areas in Latin America where minors become protagonists of kidnappings, child rape, blackmail, usury rackets, thefts , murders, with respect to which the police are powerless and sometimes colluding.
Suffice it to mention the 'Mara Salvatrucha' and the 'Mara 18', two real gangs of young thugs capable of anything, with machetes. A gangrene that spreads and exports, adding to the local microdelinquency.
There are also episodes in which minors become protagonists of acts of challenge by testing themselves and their own safety: jumping from a balcony, climbing on a roof, lying on the tracks or crossing them at the last minute while a train is arriving. , use smartphones and tablets to network threatening actions, photos and videos with a sexual background, extreme games that cause suffocation, what were once called stunts but which were characterized by basic naivety while now taking on increasingly extreme connotative tones and chilling.
Gilbert Cesbron had written an eloquent book on the subject of juvenile distress and frailty, starting with the title – “ Lost dogs without a collar ” – set in the immediate postwar period. Themes, as we can see, recurring with different characteristics in times of prosperity or crisis: the defeat of the condition of minors, of the victims, of the executioners and – over time – of their inscrutable interchangeability remains. It is a generational problem that repeats itself, probably the most painful and difficult for the whole of society to which it is difficult to find a solution by choosing between understanding the contexts of life and severity of judgment, whether it concerns parental responsibility or the guilt of minors. themselves. The figure of the juvenile judge Julien Lamy – who stands in the background of the events narrated by Cesbron – also summarizes the most effective attitude with a current value: the ability to listen, know, explain, use the example juggling between benevolence and the duty to enforce the rules, to bring out in the children and their families of origin – in an apparently hopeless context – the awareness of what is good and what is bad.
It is not a question of naive laxity but of a choice that relies on human understanding.
It is not reduced to mere weakness because it consists rather in the ability to cultivate the seed of hope.
Using a good example and promoting a healthy sentimental education are two ways to go even where everything seems compromised.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/come-insegnare-la-consapevolezza-del-bene-e-del-male-ai-giovani/ on Sat, 05 Nov 2022 07:12:51 +0000.