The Italian teacher Nuccio Ordine (Diamante, 1958) was born in a small Calabrian town without a bookstore and learned to read thanks to television, the comics that his grandfather sold in a kiosk and a good teacher. He now has the goal of getting the new generations to become avid readers. And he does it through dialogue with the classics. He has published acclaimed essays such as Clásicos para la vida (2016) or the most recent, Men are not islands (Acantilado / Quaderns Crema), in which he dialogues with works of universal literature with current messages.
Where does this fascination for the classics come from?
I always really liked a phrase that I read as a young man in the novel Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. Adriano says: “My first homeland was books.” My homeland is books, my house is the house where I have my books, in Rende, in Calabria, ten minutes from the university where I teach. School was very important to me, which is why I have been fighting for years to defend education from today’s mercantilist drift. The fundamental value is to make students understand that you do not study to earn money or for a degree, but to be better. For me, reading has always been a way of traveling with my thoughts. By reading we can live more lives. It is a wonderful experience. For example, when I visited Cartagena for the first time, in Colombia, I knew about the sweets portal because I had read Love in the Time of Cholera.
What would you say to those parents worried that their children study literature and not another career with apparent opportunities to earn a better living?
That they are clichés, that it is not true. The first thing we must understand is that knowledge is not an instrument to earn money, but rather to learn to live and understand life. It is better to earn two thousand euros and be happy because you like the work you do than to earn twenty thousand euros for something you don’t like. These are the things that the school should teach. It is not true that today we must all be experts in technology. The same scientists say that a basic culture is needed that can be built on curiosity. The best physicists who win competitions in Geneva are those who have done Latin and Greek and come from a humanistic background. Einstein said that to kill science we must train little scientific soldiers. By specializing students you kill science, because science calls for curiosity, fantasy, imagination. To cultivate all this history, beauty, Greek and Latin are very important. Today we have good technicians, but they are ignorant. Training little soldiers that we load like robots to do this job does not allow true development of society and there are many things that we are losing now because information is confused with knowledge.
And it’s getting harder and harder to read well without looking at your phone every five minutes.
It’s another madness. There are psychiatrists and doctors in the United States and Europe studying children’s dependence on devices. It can be a phone, a screen, a video game or a television. Students spend a lot of time on these things. And what does the school do? I propose to detoxify at school, educate students to think that if you turn off your mobile for four or five hours nothing serious happens. The problem is that right now the school places a very strong emphasis on devices. Millions of euros are paid to buy things that are obsolete in six months. The rule of technology is to form eternal consumers.
Is it true that young people have trouble paying attention while reading?
It’s not the youth’s fault. The other day I was in Brussels and a lady was playing a movie for a one-year-old child on her mobile. If you start a year later, it is normal for there to be a dependency. It is true that the threshold of attention goes down continuously, but if you have a good page of a classic, silence falls. I have about three hundred students and the first moments are very hard because you have to be like a lion tamer who comes in to do his show, but once you have read a page and it makes the hearts and souls of the young people vibrate, they follow you, because they ask for values. Kant said that the school should be a critical place, where we teach young people to think critically, to criticize the values ​​of society, not to accept them passively. Today the training is to create passive consumer soldiers who love all these things and are not critical at all. It’s what annoys me.
What classic would you recommend to cultivate a reading pleasure for a young person who would rather be on TikTok?
A teacher walking into the classroom and talking to the students about Italian Renaissance is nonsense. You have to take a page from Ariosto from Orlando furioso and read, for example, misogynistic verses. Then read the verses in which Ariosto defends women with very current arguments. This is the danger of the cancel culture that is invading the world.
Is dialogue between centuries important?
There are people who believe that the classics should be censored. They must be read in their entirety because if you read only one verse where there is a violation, you miss the ones that are the opposite. A classic, the true classics, speak to us, but we must ask them good questions. Haste is useless. They are good for a machine, but not for understanding, for loving, for creating human bonds. Today the students are used to surfing and can’t concentrate. Proposing to a student to read a page together without distraction is a spiritual exercise. The problem is that we are creating drugged, dependent on the instruments.
In this Sant Jordi of Europe in suspense due to the Ukrainian crisis and financial fears, what should we read?
There is a wonderful text by Plutarch that is the life of Theseus, the founder of the civilization of Athens. His ship, the testimony of this victory against the minotaur. That ship is a continuous metamorphosis between past and present. This is the idea against the false identities that are murdering the world. A few weeks ago in Calabria we have seen the dramatic scene of ninety people slowly appearing on the beaches of Cutro after a shipwreck. They were just looking for a better life. The politicians who build walls do not understand what human solidarity is, they only think about money and a selfish vision of life. We are building an inhuman humanity. I would like to reflect for a moment on another book that I would like to recommend.
Which?
The one that makes us understand the contradictions we live with technology, 1984 by George Orwell. Young people can understand Big Brother, this eye that controls each of our gestures and words. The same as a mobile phone today. With a big difference, that in Orwell’s novel everyone fears this eye. Not today, today we believe we are free and happy, but we live in a prison whose walls we cannot see. That is why today’s Big Brother is more dangerous, because he is the brother we all love. Young people do not know that a device steals your life. You have the illusion of freedom and permanent communication, but it is a form of new loneliness. We do not create ties, but the illusion of ties.
Is it possible to deepen relationships through networks?
The technological instrument is like a drug, which in Greek means remedy, but also poison. It can cure but it can also kill, it all depends on the dose and the quantity. The virtual is also dangerous in teaching. Today, many universities say that after the pandemic we cannot return to the classroom. The learning experience can only be done in a living community, in a community that has a teacher. When Albert Camus won the Nobel, he remembered the teacher at his school in Algiers, Louis Germain. Without this professor, the Camus we have known would not be Camus. I would not be who I am today without the teachers I have had.
Is it much more difficult to remember years after a teacher that you had through the screen?
Today many universities with the European recovery plan, which are many millions of euros, have the idea of ​​creating a digital school, but they have not understood that if there are no good teachers, all this money is useless, because no screen can change the life of a student Only good teachers can do it.
What does Barcelona and the Sant Jordi festival transmit to you?
I read the first description of Barcelona in Don Quixote. Don Quixote makes a trip to Barcelona and says: “Archive of courtesy, shelter for foreigners, hospital for the poor, homeland for the brave, revenge for the offended and pleasant correspondence of firm friends and in a place and in unique beauty.” It seems to me a fantastic definition of Barcelona. Sant Jordi is wonderful. Seeing the streets full of books, of people who talk and are happy because there are books… it’s wonderful. The love of books is the love of freedom. Machiavelli said that the world is divided between who knows and who does not know. Who does not know is a slave to who knows. Books help us to learn, they speak to us and allow us to be better, they answer our questions, especially the contemporary classics. That is why we have to read and fight to read the books. It is not true that it is money that makes human dignity, it is knowledge. You can have a lot of money and be ignorant, or you can have little and be an educated man who can reason with his head. This is freedom.
