The 24th edition of the March of Barbiana will be held on Sunday 25 May in Vicchio. The theme of this edition is ‘School Teacher of Peace’.
People will walk up to the small village of Barbiana, where with Don Lorenzo Milani an extraordinary educational experience was born, for ‘a school that is an instrument of democracy and social emancipation, that teaches how to collaborate and not to prevaricate, that leaves no one behind and is a place where one learns to live together in diversity and to compose it, valuing what we have in common with others and not what differentiates us’.
In preparation for the March of Barbiana, meetings and activities are planned both at Vicchio and in Mugello and in Florence with realities linked to Father Balducci's experience.
APPEAL MARCH TO BARBIANA - 25 MAY 2025 ‘SCHOOL TEACHER OF PEACE
The present moment is difficult and painful.
The world bleeds from many wars and the law of the strongest besieges democracy, radically changing international relations, but also social and productive relations within our communities. The uncontrolled growth of socio-economic inequalities and the strenuous survival of so many people in our country and throughout the West are ignored in favour of destructive profit and competition logics. Unbridled capitalism exalts greedy individualism and increases widespread violence.
In this context, the arms race deploys resources taken away from schools and healthcare.
Public schools are no longer a priority and, if they endure, it is thanks to the goodwill of teachers and school staff alone. The rhetoric on merit, often used to legitimise privileges of census and birth, and which constitutes an instrument of prevarication, aimed at dividing the world into the deserving and the discarded, at turning the school into the hospital that cures the healthy and rejects the sick, provides no answer to this neglect.
In the face of this state of affairs, I CARE still constitutes not only a cry of resistance, but a peremptory invitation to rediscover the irreplaceable function of the school, as a place for forming consciences and developing a critical mind capable of denouncing the evils of present society, as a collaborative daily practice that habituates one to discuss, to feel responsible, to risk taking a position, to expose oneself to understand the other, to build bridges and paths of a common path in view of a different and shared future. The citizens of this proud and supportive land of Mugello and the province of Florence know this well with their history of struggles and social conquests.
That untranslatable motto of the best young Americans, ‘I care’ ‘I care’ today has as its opposite not only the fascist ‘I don't give a damn’ and its hatred for life and diversity, but also the motto of the worst old Americans ‘there is no alternative’, there is no alternative... to the law of profit, to war, to the success of the strongest and the discarding of the weakest. CARE today means not resigning oneself to the idea of the inevitable, that nothing can be changed, and instead convincing oneself that democracy will die if sovereign citizens do not use the ‘weapons’ the Constitution assigns them, starting with the vote.
The school of Barbiana and the work of Don Lorenzo were founded on these principles and this practice. Barbiana was a school of citizenship, founded on the rejection of individualism and destructive competition, which drives war and the predatory market.
The school of Barbiana still has much to teach today, and for this reason the theme of this year's March of Barbiana, on 25 May, will be SCHOOL MAESTRA OF PEACE, to march together for a school that is an instrument of democracy and social emancipation, that teaches collaboration and not prevarication, that leaves no one behind and is a place where we learn to live together in diversity and to compose it, valuing what we have in common with others and not what differentiates us.
Il programma:
Ore 9.30 Raduno al Lago Viola
Ore 10.00 Partenza della Marcia
Ore 11.00 Arrivo a Barbiana
Saluti Istituzionali
Interverranno:
Rosy Bindi, Presidente del Comitato per il centenario della nascita di don Lorenzo Milani
Vincenzina Schiavone, D.s. I.C. Vicchio
Angela Batistini, D.s. I.C. Borgo San Lorenzo
Padre Bernardo Gianni
Romano Prodi
Interventi conclusivi di rappresentanti di insegnanti, genitori e studenti
Info: 055 8439269 / www.istituzionedonmilani.org
