Educating young people in the beauty of ingenuity (and hard work)

The centrality of the value of 'work', inextricably linked to hard work and ingenuity, was undermined in the aftermath of 1968 by the parallel development of a policy that, with the complicity of a certain trade union drift, favoured clientelistic logics that bordered on indulgence towards forms of lack of commitment, strong claims, and an underestimation of the constitutional balance between rights and duties.

Merit has disappeared from contract logics, replaced by egalitarian flattening, automatic progressions, and the rejection of any form of evaluation, with indifference to results. In more recent times, we have come to grant a citizenship income that was supposed to defeat poverty by decree, in truth rewarding the renunciation of working hard to find a job, creating the false expectation of maintenance, without offering anything in return and without time limits, at the expense of the community.

The praise of hard work, commitment and responsibility has appeared at best as a rhetorical manifestation of yesteryear, at worst as a synonym for exploitation. Not to mention the expression 'making sacrifices' in the sense of being able to renounce, in view of a goal to be achieved, advantages, comforts, immediate benefits: it is now considered a disgraceful concept, to be banned from everyday language, certainly a 'reactionary' concept.

On the other hand, if we are to create the conditions for every occupation to be increasingly fulfilling, stimulating, capable of motivating, igniting passion and enthusiasm, we must put the value of work back at the centre of society. And we must do this starting at school to give new stimuli, new passion and new enthusiasm to young people who are sometimes lost or bored. It is no coincidence that I believe that the task of every school course is not only to foster the cultural enrichment and maturation of the student, but also to provide the foundations to enable him or her to effectively enter the working environment and achieve professional fulfilment.

It is important to educate young people from primary school onwards to admire the beauty of what is the fruit of art, ingenuity, hard work and commitment. Let us bring splendid artefacts of a craftsman's work into schools, let us make them admire those works of human intelligence, telling how much beauty and passion are behind them.