GROWING UP IN AN AGE THAT FEARS ADULTHOOD

 

 

As a teacher, the end of the school year always brings the buzz of the Esame di Maturità. While I wasn’t directly involved in the exam commissions this year, I couldn't resist checking the exam papers assigned on the first day for the Italian essay. Among the several different options available to the students, the B3 task immediately caught my eye.

Ironically, I found myself thinking that the prompt—centered on the boundaries of maturity—was actually far more suitable for an adult to reflect on than a teenager! Yet, if I had been sitting at one of those desks taking the exam myself, that is absolutely the task I would have chosen. The prompt was based on Frank Furedi's book I confini contano (Boundaries Matter), which references Julie Beck's article in The Atlantic, "When Are You Really an Adult?", to show how contemporary culture portrays adulthood as a nuisance where independence becomes loneliness and responsibility turns into stress.

USEFUL OR USELESS KNOWLEDGE: A DEBATE ON EDUCATION

Should schools primarily teach practical, useful skills for the real world, or is there value in cultivating knowledge that some might consider as useless? Recently, I had a thought-provoking discussion with my students on this very topic, and I shared a compelling quote by philosopher Agnes Heller with them: "If someone were to ask me, as a philosopher, what one should learn in high school, I would answer: first of all, only useless things - ancient Greek, Latin, pure mathematics, and philosophy. Everything that is useless in life. The beauty is that in this way, at the age of 18, you have a baggage of useless knowledge with which you can do anything. While with useful knowledge, you can only do small things." In this blog post, I’d like to point out the key moments of our debate about useless versus useful knowledge, exploring the merits of both sides while ultimately standing alongside Agnes Heller's perspective.