A thirteen year old enters school, when lessons have not yet started. In his hand he has a knife; hanging around his neck is a smartphone from which he has started a live broadcast filming what he is about to do in real time. The boy attacks his French teacher. He stabs her in the neck and chest and only the prompt medical intervention – via air ambulance – saves her life. The boy was stopped and then taken to the police station. He says that his gesture is due to the fact that the teacher gave him a lower grade than he thought he deserved. Furthermore, in an argument with a partner, he took the other’s defense. All this, in his view of things, justifies an attempted murder. His criminal action is not the result of angry impulse. Instead, it is a project studied in every detail. The boy goes to school wearing a sweatshirt with the words “revenge” written on it. He also has a stun gun with him. At home he procured, probably through online purchases, explosive material to produce a device which, fortunately, he never completed. It’s like watching the script of a YouTube video of an extreme challenge, that is, those videos in which there are very young people filming themselves doing very dangerous things with which they demonstrate their “alleged” courage to the world.
This whole affair highlights the worst parental and educational anxieties of the third millennium. What is happening to the very young? Why do they move in reality, imagining they are the protagonists of a film, in which criminal scripts act that will have enormous consequences on their existential journey? The news states that the thirteen-year-old, stopped almost immediately after his crazy gesture, once brought to the presidency, cried profusely, probably having realized the enormity of what he had accomplished. Here: this is, in my opinion, the still image on which to concentrate our educational reflections.
Preadolescence is an age in which the functioning of the mind pushes us to act without having “thought about it”. The emotional brain (the one that acts instinctively and on the push of the emotions that a subject experiences) is much more powerful than the cognitive brain, which is the one that is able to bring the inhibitory brakes into play, to make one reflect on the implications and consequences of one’s gesture. Many kids act on what they feel and without thinking about it. In pre-adolescence this mechanism is generated on the basis of a physiological vulnerability in which emotional power is not adequately compensated by cognitive competence. Cognitive maturity, in fact, comes slowly over time and requires all of adolescence to be fully accomplished. For this reason, pre-adolescence would need to take place in a world that “barriers” the imagination of boys and girls, directing it towards territories in which they learn responsibility, are helped to regulate their emotions, and reflect on what is good and what is bad. Instead, what has happened in the last twenty years? It has happened that our children spend more and more time in the virtual world, that real adults – those in real life – are increasingly distant and absent, silent and lacking in authority. And what every day the brains of growing minors float in a digital soup where they play shooter video games for hourswe listen to songs full of violent and contemptuous references towards everything and everyone, we watch extreme videos where everything is centered on the value of power. This is how the possibility of generating emotional, cognitive and socio-relational competence dies. So a brain that still doesn’t know how to live in the world gets used to thinking of itself as omnipotent and plans destructive, transgressive, sometimes criminal actions as in this case. Kids today feed their brains with violence and ugliness. Evil reaches the minds of those who grow much more than good. Negative models seem more popular and successful than positive ones, so having a knife in your hand may seem more advantageous – on an identity level – than having a book in your hand. This is how you act what you feel, without thinking about it. And then maybe cry out loud, once the damage has been done, because you realize that real life doesn’t work like the videos on YouTube.
What is needed? Of parents who are at their children’s side every day. Let them talk at the table with them, preventing mealtime from being yet another opportunity to scroll on the small screen. There is a need to bring into schools the testimonies of normal people – nurses, bakers, doctors, plumbers, engineers, electricians – who tell boys and girls that real life is kept up by people who manage their adult roles with commitment and responsibility every dayallowing everyone to have a life worthy of the name. There is a need to help those who grow up to imagine themselves as normal and not grandiose people, capable of handling frustrations. There is a need for students who, when faced with a bad grade, do not think about how many mistakes the teacher who gave them that grade made, but reflect on what is needed to improve on the next test. The thirteen-year-old from Bergamo committed attempted murder because he had received a lower grade than he expected. His worldview was totally self-centered: I deserve everything and if you don’t give me the credit that I think I have, then I’ll get angry with you and kill you. Eliminating the source of frustration, rather than considering it an opportunity to grow and improve: the fulcrum of narcissistic fragility lies here. And this society of such fragility is imbued with it at every level. We must start again from the fundamentals of education: that is, that growing up involves effort, commitment and responsibility. And that only the real world knows how to train in these three aspects, because the virtual one has built its fortune and success in the exact opposite, being easy, disengaged and irresponsible. Let’s start from here.
