Why study, why read; Why reason and come to doubts or conclusions that are the result of analysis, solitary thinking, passionate or calm discussion? Why exercise reason if with the help of a machine I can now construct other people’s thinking and spread it as my own? Why read if the answers are in the “system” and if it is possible to pass as wise without ever opening the book?

Teaching and learning were the most important challenge of our lives, that’s how we managed to interpret the world, place ourselves between science and philosophy, between literature and geography. This is how we clarify doubts and kill ignorance. And it was possible, in this way, to discover the complexity of history and to assume that intelligence was not always a gift associated with pride, that it was rather a challenge, a construction that allowed everyone to achieve that virtue that was reached with perseverance, with the pleasure of opening book and searching its pages for beauty, truth or doubt. And also a lie.

Finding out how little we know was a foregone conclusion. Thinking was the end of a long journey that forced us every day to exercise the ability to doubt, to discard prejudices and dogmas, to avoid traps, to begin a life among letters and numbers, to always walk and reach the end. day with humility and untouched curiosity. To know meant to understand that there was more, there was always much more, that behind every corner and every curve there were untouched topics, huge problems, questions, silences, unknown words.

All this meant always being a little ignorant, a little incomplete and humble. It was entering a library or bookstore and finding surprises, new texts and authors coming to meet us. Or with old books that we forgot or never read. He was facing a blank screen or page with no idea what to write, a little intimidated by the challenge. It was coming to class and assuming that the challenge of teaching, explaining and answering is in the eyes of the students. It was the establishment of that friendship that was born from the questions and was in the answers. For the teacher, the idea of ​​each lesson was to feed the mutual curiosity that filled the classroom. Everyone’s idea was to learn. There was a dialectic from which the teacher and the students came out enriched, full of certainties and questions, topics we were happy to face and questions that frustrated us. It was a perfect construction that was made carefully, with a sense of artistry and integrity, hand in hand, side by side. It was an endless conversation and constant doubt.

The task of teaching was to give students the necessary tools to understand, always unfinished management and unfinished business, because those who taught and those who learned were left with the conviction that certainties are not perfect or final, that there is no room for dogma, that truth is a question, never a conclusion.

Is it like this now? (OR)