“Correcting Italian homework is a torment. […] read one, you’ve read them all. Three in a row can cause death.”
If you have in mind the Starnone of his latest novels, forget him. Form, substance and times belong to another writer (in a figurative sense), the only point of contact between the pen of yesterday and that of today is the ironic component, typical of Neapolitan culture.
The book is in fact the disarming transposition of the 1985-86 school year (the first edition of the text dates back to 1987, which follows a previous collection of articles), in which the shortcomings of the Italian school system are laid bare, but also all the characters who populate that world. What leaves us speechless is the total contemporaneity of the text, because the book seems not to be forty years old, but to have been written the day before yesterday (if it weren’t for some marked political-cultural references of the time). Complaints against a system that always appears to be inadequate for the primary needs of students and workers, between those who do their work with passion and are aware of contributing to the education of a new generation and those who, perhaps feeling discouraged (carelessness?), work purely out of trifle.
With the irony, which we referred to above, the author takes on the role of a new prototype of teacher, the post-1968 one, in step with the times but accused of having started with the throwing of a small snowball to create that avalanche that would later destroy the school institution. With the benefit of hindsight, as someone who has no longer attended school for years, reading the text offered us the opportunity to think in a mature way about some dynamics and role playing that when you experience them you are never able to look at with detachment.
Despite the criticism received during its release, and even before that with the articles that appeared in the newspapers, we think that the book should be read by those who begin teaching, as a necessary training manual; and perhaps also by a good part of the parents who have school-age children, so as not to immediately seek conflict with the teachers regardless of whatever issues are faced.
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Domenico Starnone, Ex cattedra and other school stories, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2017 (first edition 1987)