The legacy of Paolo Borsellino, a lesson in legality for high school graduation

All mafias fear the school more than justice. The Sicilian writer Gesualdo Bufalino added that, more than by the Army, the mafia will be defeated by an army of teachers. 'Education is what frightens the mafia,' Fiammetta Borsellino, daughter of the judge assassinated on 19 July 1992 in Palermo, reminded the second and third grade students of the Istituto Comprensivo Calò - G. Deledda - S.G. Bosco di Ginosa (Taranto) on 5 November 2024.

It is a lesson in legality that the Ministry of Education has submitted to students as a track for their high school graduation exams, leading them to reflect on the text by judge Paolo Borsellino - 'Young people, my hope' - that Epoca, a weekly magazine of publisher Arnoldo Mondadori that ran from 1950 to 1997, published on 14 October 1992. A few months after the Capaci and Via D'Amelio massacres, which took the lives of Judge Falcone, his wife, Borsellino and with them the men and women of his escort.

Fiammetta Borsellino, just a few months ago, in one of her many meetings in schools, that time in the Murgia Taranto, reminded young people of the importance of education as a means of resistance against the Mafia. School, in fact, is a place of growth, where young people can learn to recognise and reject the mafia mentality and choose instead the path of legality and justice.

And it was precisely on the concept of consensus and rejection that Judge Borsellino beat in that text published posthumously and on which the students were urged to reflect. And to reflect - and this was perhaps the most interesting aspect - on the magistrate's optimism, despite everything and everyone.

'I declare myself an optimist,' reads the sentences in the exam outline, 'even though I know that the Mafia is extremely powerful today, because I am convinced that one of the greatest strengths of the Mafia organisation is consensus. It is the consensus that surrounds these organisations that distinguishes them from any other criminal organisation. If young people today start to grow up and become adults and do not find it natural to give the mafia this consensus and believe that they can live with it, we will certainly not win in two to three years. But I believe that if this attitude of the young people is nurtured and encouraged, it will not be possible for the mafia organisations, when it is these young people who will regulate society, to find that consensus that unfortunately my generation gave and gives to a very great extent. This makes me optimistic'.