In 1967 a small book was published in Italy that today is gaining quite a following in North America. "Letter to a Teacher" ("Lettera a una professoressa") consisted of a single letter to a teacher, the content of which was drawn from the letters of eight Italian schoolboys who were flunked by their teacher. The schoolboys were of the "lower class" while their teacher was described as "bourgeois."
"Dear Miss,
You won't remember me or my name. You have flunked so many of us. On the other hand I have often had thoughts about you, and the other teachers, and about that institution which you call 'school' and about the kids that you flunk. You flunk us right out into the fields and factories and there you forget us."
In 1970 the book was introduced to English-speakers and recently has been published in a new edition by Marvin Hoffman, a veteran teacher and administrator. Mr. Hoffman reminds us that the experiences of disadvantaged Italian schoolboys forty years ago can inspire us still to overcome what some might soberly term "discouragement" by their teacher.
"You Won't Remember Me: The Schoolboys of Barbiana Speak to Today," published by Teacher's College Press at Columbia University, is an account of the school where students learned to overcome their social-class limitations. "It resonates today as educators help socially disadvantaged students realize their potentials," said Marvin Hoffman, founding director of the University of Chicago's North Kenwood Oakland Charter School. He is also Senior Research Associate at the University's Center for Urban School Improvement and Associate Director of the University's Urban Teacher Education Program.
"I'm not sure how any book, in literature or social sciences, earns the classics label. For me, it simply means that it had a major impact on a whole generation -- my generation -- of teachers, and it confirmed the belief that teaching could be a means to bring greater equity to our inequitable society," Hoffman said.
The schoolboys brought a myriad of negative school experiences with them when they came to a small school operated by priest Don Lorenzo Milani. The new students had been told by former teachers that their futures were limited. But Milani told them differently: you will succeed. And they did. They learned to write and think for themselves.
They wrote essays in the form of letters to voice their thoughts about social class and to challenge their former teachers. Their essays were collected in a book, "Letter to a Teacher" and published in 1967. At the time it became a challenge to the way these students had been treated in Italian schools. It also became a best seller. Hoffman takes a new look at the book to see what lessons it might hold for educators today.
Hoffman read the book shortly after its English version became available in 1970. It inspired his own work. He is intricately involved with a University of Chicago program modeled after the "teaching hospital method" of mentorship which is "attempting to prepare fourth-year students for teaching in arguably the most challenging environment for educators: inner-city public schools."
"During the first year of our new UTEP (Urban Teachers Education Program), I read some excerpts from my weather-beaten copy to our students and found that it resonated with them in the ways it had when I was at their stage," he said. "So I felt it deserved to be back in the world because the problems the schoolboys were addressing had not improved one whit."
Teachers are trained in UTEP to become effective in working with disadvantaged students in urban schools who have much in common with those eight Italian schoolboys.
On lesson learned: Urban schools seeking to improve outcomes for students frequently have to increase the amount of time students spend in school. At Barbiana, school was in session 12 hours a day, 363 days a year.
"Expanding time in school is what we do in our charter schools, by adding tutoring time, summer time and after-school time. This is based on the belief that all children can learn," Hoffman said.
Another lesson is derived from Milani's belief that schools also need to reflect the reality of students' experiences. This is certainly nothing new for many teachers: John Dewey, an early Chicago professor who founded the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, also respected that principle.
"There are so many ways in which the schoolboys of Barbiana point up the way in which school is organized to favor the children of the doctors, not the peasant children," Hoffman said. "School doesn't reflect their reality, especially the school of high-stakes testing. The schoolboys had the capacity to be great teachers, but couldn't pass the teachers' exam. Success in school, as it was constituted, would only rip them from their communal moorings, and that was a deal they were not prepared to make."
The school organized by Milani respected the boys as learners, while also respecting their backgrounds, practices that made his school flourish. Hoffman encourages educators to keep that in mind as they plan their lessons and the programs that will challenge our schoolchildren.
The Advantage Press, Inc. publishes a number of behavior improvement packets that can help teach students the importance of following classroom rules.