Music courses in middle and high school are constantly increasing in terms of students, due to the high quality of the musicians who have been selected as teachers.
Primary Music teachers are all graduates of the conservatory. The hour of Music is therefore the occasion to enhance the talent of children and play a very animated lesson.
Normally, it is the Christmas, Carnival and year-end celebrations that demonstrate the enormous work of the teachers. Everyone does their job well, but each on their own.
There is a disease of the Italian school, which is very widespread even among the Catholic-inspired private schools, that basically considers every school as a world of its own. Being together, perhaps in a “network”, to make each one’s own individual interest. Only what I bring home as an individual counts, not the growth of the whole group or of all schools.
This happens also in the omni-comprehensive institutes, where among kindergarten, primary, and secondary of first and second degree schools, everyone is accustomed to realise his/her performances, his/her concerts, his/her theatrical representations, his/her parties. Schools with a single management, but with different institutions and sometimes housed in different buildings.
Situation, the latter, which certainly doesn’t make it easy to be together.
Then, what is the element that could keep the different components of the same structure together?
It is a universal language, an element of the human soul that generates an invisible magnetism that attracts people, without making people understand the reasons for this attraction or approach: music. Hence the idea: how to realise the sense of belonging to an institution like the school?
With a great Christmas concert among all the school components.
Yes, the concert is the solution.
I put all my persuasiveness into play for the event.
It is also true that from the initial idea to the concrete one there is often a lot of difference. We imagine great celebrations and then we get little more than a musical essay. Execution rarely exceeds the imagination. This is one of those situations.
Among the grumbles of some parents who complain about the concert time, the unhappy day chosen because it’s a Saturday night, the difficulty in finding a parking spot, the lack of motivation towards a concert that is not the Christmas recital of their children, so the scheduled evening arrives at the beginning of the school year.
More than six hundred children between kindergarten and primary school play as the background and choir. More than fifty orchestras play with strings, woodwind and brass instruments.
It is the evening where the protagonists are the children and the youth of the school.
It is the evening where the sense of belonging to the school must emerge, where the reason to stay together under the same roof must be found.
It is the evening that must help all of us to understand the value of teamwork, of teamwork aimed at promoting the talent of our students.
In the end, we should feel proud like when we sing the national anthem with conviction and at the top of our lungs.
Here, however, the game to be played is called the school-family alliance. The winners must be the protagonists of the evening: the pupils. Between classical, modern and Christmas themes, the concert develops in crescendo, where the technical-logistical difficulties due to the acoustics of the Church hosting the event, and the large number of students involved, seem to not exist.
I like to define the organisation as that invisible element of a structure whose absence justifies its presence: in a nutshell when something is not organised you immediately realise it, if everything goes smoothly nobody notices anything.
It is a Christmas concert that takes shape as the minutes pass and, at the end of the evening, punctuated by convinced applause for each song performed, the degree of satisfaction with what was heard is all in the eyes of smiling and satisfied teachers, children, parents.
Moans disappeared. Problems solved. Difficulties overcome.
Happy children. Happy kids. Satisfied young people. Exhausted teachers. Spent coordinators.
A riot of emotions punctuates the comments of parents, teachers and students in the Church that slowly becomes free of the more than two thousand people present. Someone commenting on the outcome of the concert asks: “But who had the idea of this event?”
I believe that the value of things lies as much in invention as in execution. In team play you win together.
I am convinced that in some contexts, Mathematics can be defined as an imprecise science. Yes, because in this case the sum of the different components gives a better result than its individual addends.
It is as if two plus two made five.
The element that has been added is called ‘motivation’.
And it is always the motivation that makes the difference on the outcome of a job, a service, a project.
Teachers’ motivation to do their job. The motivation of the students in choosing the school.
The motivation of parents in raising children. The motivation of managers in listening to the needs.
Motivation comes from the ability to see beyond the existing and be able to bring those who walk with you into your vision.
‘Two plus two makes five’, do not teach it at school during Maths time, but during the life of social and educational relationships.
A school that finds its sense of belonging to a concert, an event, a ritual, a particular celebratory moment is a school that knows how to give reasons.
The school that bases its identity on generating motivations is a school where it is possible to realise one’s dreams. In the realisation of our dreams we find the sense of our identity.
Therefore, music is the art that helps us find our identity, to discover who we are.
The concert as a tool to participate, to live together, to play as a team but above all to discover that together we are worth much more than our individual identities.
Discovering that you are part of a project that is bigger than your single life is beautiful, as it is discovering that the set of more people is much less than the value that those people give in their being together.
I continue to wonder, therefore, why this reality cannot also apply to educational institutions among themselves. Coming together not to get confused, not to fight, not to copy each other, but to discover a new identity within a shared dream.
I therefore believe that the problem of our Italian school is only one: the dream is missing.
Dreaming alone is beautiful. Dreaming in many is great. Dreaming together is the beginning of reality.
With educational persuasion we can share a dream. With a concert you can create a sense of belonging. With a successful outcome, motivation can be found.
From the motivation it is possible to generate a new hope in the Italian school: to see one day our children happy to live their life. And this is because in the school they have found ways to develop their talents to make them available to the community to which they belong. Sometimes a concert is enough to reawaken the sense of this belonging. Brethrens of Italy, Italy has awakened…
Giordano Casonato
Head of GSO School