I get more attention if I don't show up. What do students who say no to the final exam rebel against?
"The best is the enemy of the good." This phrase of ancient popular wisdom, beloved even by Voltaire, perhaps suffices to sum up the entire story of the boys and girls—eight in total, three in 2024, five this year—who decided to refuse to take the oral exam for the State Exam . A longed-for, longed-for, nearly achieved, barely passing grades. Now, somehow, it's been put on hold. Education Minister Valditara has decided to respond firmly: threatening future high school graduates with failure and reinstating the original warning.
Maturity, the test is this: growing up. But it's difficult to grow if the conditions are lacking. A tree with withered roots bears no fruit. And, not surprisingly, Voltaire's Candide first studies, then lives, and finally cultivates his garden. He thus discovers that what his teacher Pangloss—an incurable optimist—wants to teach him doesn't stand up to the test of reality: perfection is an ideal, and as such, unattainable. A little more Voltaire, a pinch of healthy disillusionment. It would be useful to eliminate, at least figuratively, the best and worst grades. Free children from the cage of performance. Perhaps, upon closer inspection, they already are disillusioned: those who don't excel, those who don't excel, distance themselves from the palace of merit.
A protest that interrupts the automatismDeductions that defy linear logic and optimistic rationality. But they resonate perfectly with our times: accelerated, high-performance, unstable . Of course, what the boys and girls, some with clearer ideas than others, declare they want to question is an entire educational model. "We are numbers," they say. The act of not showing up for the oral exam, then, is more than an escape, a way of existing. To interrupt an automatic process. Like putting a pebble in a wheel. A purely pedagogical problem, then? The need for school reform? The shortest route is not always the best. No, society and culture are also involved here.
Rosapia Lauro Grotto, professor of Dynamic Psychology at the University of Florence and a psychotherapist, interprets the gesture precisely this way: not as a structured, politicized protest, but as "a spontaneous, nonviolent, within-the-rules operation that signals a profound unease." An attempt at subjectivization within a system that leaves no room: "They are seen much more like this, in their absence, than in their presence . That's where something is happening. A crack from which a powerful question seeps, one we can't afford to ignore." A question, however, that questions adults—parents, teachers, institutions—even before the children. The developmental task of adolescence is to "vaguely understand who you are" in order to enter adulthood. But how can this be done if a relational mirror is missing? "Contemporary society allows for multiple ways of being, but offers no room for feedback : there's no time, no presence, no attention. And that reflection," Lauro Grotto emphasizes, "doesn't arise in a mind isolated in a vacuum, but in interaction with another. With expert guidance, with a truly interested adult."
Young people don't just seek academic validation, but also identity-building . And here a profound psychosocial issue emerges: the fragility of narcissistic equilibrium typical of our era . "Young people in therapy," explains Lauro Grotto, "often talk to me about this uncontrollable drive to excel, to outdo others at all costs. As if it were an instinctive, uncontrollable impulse. A constant need for validation intertwined with a context filled with anxiety , guilt, and fear of not being enough. The disinterest of adults, the silence of educational contexts, send a clear message: you are not worth my while." Alongside the purely psychological dimension, there is the pedagogical one. Changing the methods of evaluation is not enough. It is the method that must be questioned: the pedagogical model. The obsessive emphasis on performance has generated a system that, forgetting to educate, limits itself to selection. There is no guidance, only measurement. "Making excellence the sole objective of education is a perverse approach," says Lauro Grotto, "because it completely obscures the efforts of those who, starting from difficult conditions, achieve a passing grade. This achievement is sometimes more significant than that of those who excel from a privileged background."
The "pedagogy of excellence" —as she calls it—has concrete and serious effects: "It disarticulates cooperation within classrooms," shatters the dimension of solidarity, and erases the sense of the group as a resource. "Today, those who are good no longer feel they are good for the group, but against others. Knowledge becomes personal loot, to be protected, not shared. But authentic learning is always collective." According to Lauro Grotto, and a large number of studies on the subject, in fact: "The best creativity comes from connected minds, not from performative solitude. Innovative thinking emerges where there is exchange, trust, and shared time." For this reason, Lauro Grotto specifies, the answer is not simply greater empathy. We need a radical rethinking of the conditions of learning. We need to restore meaning to the experience. "Even the best content is overwhelmed by a poor learning experience. If there isn't a good climate, a relational space, the content is lost." And, finally, the question of assessment. Which is never neutral, but rather touches the heart of identity: "The first foundation of pedagogy should be that we don't evaluate people, but rather their evidence . A golden rule: simple and revolutionary. Judging a person—you're inadequate, you're not enough—wounds deeply. Explaining with respect where evidence is lacking changes everything. Above all, it restores awareness and removes humiliation."
A move that puts adults to the testThe students introduced themselves, waited their turn, and said, "No, thank you." An extreme form of defense, and at the same time, affirmation. Faceless, the only way to be seen is to withdraw. To become a crack, a void, white noise. A gesture that doesn't transgress the rules, doesn't violate the field, doesn't break the pact. It fits perfectly within the normative framework. It's within the game. Indeed, it exposes it from within. Perhaps this is precisely the reflection that the "absences-presents" of the kids leave us. If they "play" according to the rules written by adults, and today those same adults judge them to be wrong or unacceptable, then, with their gesture, they are making the only truly astute move: demonstrating—with the game itself—that that game no longer works. In doing so, they don't shy away from maturity. They relaunch it. And, perhaps more than it might seem, they put adults to the test of their own.
Luce
