final outcome of the Hearts of whipped cream workshop
La Vetreria performing arts school
“Dear Gennariello, your peers, at this moment in your life are your most important educators. In your eyes, they undermine both family and school. They reduce fathers and teachers to gasping shadows. And they don’t need a great effort to achieve this result. In fact, they aren’t even aware of it. It’s enough for them – to destroy the value of every other educational source – simply to be there: to be there as they are. They have a very powerful weapon in their hands: intimidation and blackmail. This is something as old as the world. Adult conformism is already mature, ferocious, complete among children. They know in a refined way how to make their peers suffer: and they do it much better than adults because their will to make others suffer is gratuitous: it is pure violence. They discover this will as a right. They invest all their intact vitality in it, and also, naturally, their innocence. Their pedagogical pressure on you knows neither persuasion, nor understanding, nor any form of pity, or humanity. Only when your companions become friends do they perhaps discover persuasion, understanding, pity, humanity: but the friends are four or five, at most. The others are wolves: and they use you as a guinea pig on which to experiment their violence and towards whom to test the goodness of their conformism.”
From Pier Paolo Pasolini, “I ragazzi sono conformisti due volte”, Il mondo, May 15, 1975.
