I am grateful for the possibility given to me to tell you about the Free University project, which has been active for two years now, grateful because, like all intellectuals, I live inside my head where everything appears clear and well-structured to me while perhaps, on the outside, certain ideas may appear fuzzy or unfeasible. So I start from the beginning to explain how the project was born and what its goals are.
When I resigned from a national television in 2000, in which I was director for a news program, to devote myself fully to my ‘newborn’ role of mother, there was a moment when I knew what I did NOT want to do (misinforming naive and unsuspecting spectators who do not know the mechanisms by which news is cleverly packaged and passed on as true and real facts), but I didn’t know what I wanted to dedicate the second part of my life to. I will admit that getting out of the system is very tiring but, if you manage to extricate yourself from the slime that surrounds you like Neo in the Matrix, what you experience and see around you for the first time with other eyes is nothing short of being amazing.
Understood with great amazement of living within a ‘narrative’, that is a fiction that one tries tooth and nail to pass off as the only possible reality, I asked myself what to do to ‘atone’ for my unaware (at the beginning) working for the megaphone of the System, the Television. “I disinform”, I said to myself, therefore I must try to do the opposite, to inform but above all to act so that those who now sleep peacefully and blissfully while sitting comfortably on the sofa in the living room watching TV can shake up from the hypnosis produced by the television medium and, waking up, making conscious choices for themself and their family.
I then thought that maybe we adults were perhaps irretrievably lost… but what about the children? How to save the future? I said it in hindsight as someone who had become a mother at the age of 40 of a splendid little girl to whom I had given a wish as a name: Anna Libera. While growing up, observing her as she progressed, I had many ideas for my research on what to do: today I can truly say that she was my true teacher, more than my 4 degrees, two taken after being fired from TV in psychology. A brief, disappointing but illuminating passage in politics finally made me understand that the world can only be saved if we start again from Education. We are the fruit of our education and, if we don’t de-condition ourselves, we will pass on to our children the only education model we know: the one with which we were, more often than not, badly raised. I use the term ‘raised’ which is usually used for animals because it is closest to what children experience in traditional education: what are we but cows to be milked from the moment we are born to death? And, I won’t go into details, but you don’t have to be vegan to know what treatment is reserved for calves in our apparent civilized world. Cannon fodder… these are our children at school… in the last two years they have been so shamelessly blatant in their malicious intentions that only the blind, the deaf and the dumb have not noticed.
So the goal was to save the future, i.e. the children… but how? And here they came in to the rescue many new pedagogues, from Rousseau to Pestalozzi, from Illich to Don Milani, from Aivhanov to Tagore … These researchers have been trying to tell us for hundreds of years what education should be like for a world that can be defined as human but, coincidentally, they are authors who are not studied in the universities of the system if not minimally. Once the goal was understood, it was necessary to equip oneself to take the first step: that of DECONDITIONING adults who feel the urge towards the world to come. We are talking about parents and educators… not all of course, but only those who have understood that ‘there is something rotten in education’ paraphrasing the good Hamlet. After having explored the situation of ‘alternative’ methods to traditional schooling in Italy by writing the book ‘Pedagogy, an Art in Becoming’, I had the opportunity to meet hundreds of families at the Tutta un’Altra Scuola events organized in collaboration with Terra Nuova Editions. All the people I met asked me the same question: how to apply the New Pedagogy now, in our homes, in our schools, in our daily life?
The path called ScuolAgire was born from this question, a path structured on online and live meetings to provide as many tools as possible to parents and educators who want to get out of the ‘fence’ of traditional education and change the paradigm in which we have been inserted at our birth and which is miserably collapsing. From 2014 to 2020 hundreds of people embarked on these paths to decondition themselves and network to create solid educating communities.
Then a new request arose: can we go deeper into some of the topics covered in the basic path? Thus, from a new need, to meet a new need, he was born in 2020 (after a long pregnancy) the project of the Free University of New Pedagogy. Inspired by the writings of Ivan Illich, we said to ourselves that it is absurd not to give anyone, beyond their school qualifications which we do not require, the possibility of being able to study, freely, without grades and constraints, the subjects we are most passionate about. With us, anyone can register for one of our in-depth studies online or live, we do not ask for previous diplomas or give qualifications … we are not a diploma factory, one of the many who live in the system that feeds on qualifications and pieces of paper that often do not correspond to a real acquisition value of the knowledge that that title would certify. Most of the courses are online, at convenient times to be followed by people from all over the country, but not only! Our live courses for now take place in the physical campus of the University, in Campo Tagore, an equipped Campus/Ashram area in Ogliastra, the wildest part of Sardinia. As in the times of the Greeks, the live courses are ‘lived’ together, we study, we sleep in tents, we eat together, we go to the beach or to the sacred places of the island in an attempt to experience the knowledge rather than just reading it in the books.
We deal with many topics: Quantum Physics, Esotericism, Exopolitics, History, Alchemy, Esoteric Dante, Astrology, Empathic Education, Psychosynthesis, International Law, Evolutionary Theatre… with authentic divergent teachers.
In conclusion, a balance sheet: has my goal been achieved in these years of hard but beautiful work? Not completely, not yet, because the project is very vast, to such an extent that I will most likely not be able to see all the fruits of sowing….but that doesn’t matter. In my mind, romantically, as in Jean Giono’s short story, The Man Who Planted Trees, I imagine that as I passed, behind my back, I will have left a trail of luxuriant forests of more aware men and women…and this is what that really matters.
