Expelled Death and education of the unpronounceable.

Abstract

Educating to loss is a paradox. The pain of mourning not only always finds us unprepared, but also highlights, more and more frequently, the lack of recognition of this possibility, which is certainty in human existence, in those who find themselves experiencing it. Death, at its occurrence, seems to be connoted with elements of bewilderment and disbelief, almost as if it was not the aim of every coming to the world, of each new birth. People think of loss only as a possibility in the lives of others but not in their own. The other with whom, in this circumstance, we persist in thinking that we do not have, or rather we do not want to have, anything in common.

And yet, precisely in an age of denial and removal of pain, in which we are anxiously trying to forget the limit that marks the existence of each human being, which is increasingly alone in front of the interruptions of life, education is called to take its task to the full. Educating to finitude, death and suffering is a challenge that pedagogy must accept. To make the subject aware on complex, delicate and fundamental issues, such as death and pain, means to push pedagogy, and consequently education, to name what for adults it is difficult to consider and, in the case of children, it is even unpronounceable.

To deny, to remove, to exorcise are therefore the verbs that describe and summarize the relationship between subject-death-pain in our time and which do not allow us to design and implement educational-elaborative actions that can help the subject to confront the limit, to accept the pain, to accept one’s own life, to resist.

Through the narrative genre, we can to start education courses on death, on finitude, on suffering.