Training tame workers, nurturing empty children and adolescents who need skills that are expendable hic et nunc. Schools are becoming large discount stores (Mc Laren, 2015) and young people, like ghosts in the corridors, are increasingly struggling with a latent disorientation, a pervasive sense of loneliness and resignation. Sartre’s statement «L’enfer c’est les autres» (1944) seems to have been adopted as the leitmotif of the neoliberal system. The symptomatic landscape of fragility is dramatic, but there is a lack of greater concern for the stories of these young people, which are less and less listened to. In this sense, an exploratory study with a qualitative-quantitative methodology was carried out, during the school year 2022/2023 in some high schools in the provinces of Padua and Treviso (Italy). Among the core elements attributed to adolescent fragility, increasing relational difficulties (Barone, 2018), become the focus of our research. Starting from a critical emancipatory perspective (Denzin&Lincoln, 2023), the data collected return many suffering Italian students (35% of the 'fragile' adolescents state that they have never communicated their state of malaise to their classmates), but someone who retains a democratic soul: 33% of the participants state that they have often experienced support and solidarity from their classmates. A widespread sense of isolation and loss of self-identity raises the educational challenge of rediscovering the value of the other, of relationships, and of promoting a school that is a guardian of democratic values (Giroux, 2018), including an emotional development (Mortari, 2017). The choice is ours alone.

Authors:
Giulia Elardo, University of Padua, Italy
Natascia Bobbo, University of Padua, Italy

About the Presenter(s)
Elardo Giulia, I'm a pedagogist attending the second year of Doctorate studies in Pedagogical Sciences at the Univeristy of Padova (IT).
My interests lie in the wellbeing of youths in educational spaces and time. Nourishing their own life' vocation.

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