Celeste Costantino: emotional education should be taught in schools

With a calendar in hand, I scroll through the days of the week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. In Italy, a woman is killed every three days. It is not an emergency; instead it is a system, and must be tackled as such. This is the opinion of Una Nessuna Centomila [One One Hundred Thousand] the first Italian foundation which, while supporting anti-violence centers financially, promotes the prevention of and fight against violence. “One Hundred Thousand” like the many social, cultural and political practices that can be experimented on to subtract the new generations from gender stereotypes. Above all, emotional education in schools. This is a right that was sanctioned in Europe by the Istanbul Convention that in Italy remains mired in controversy and struggles to find its space. We spoke about it with the vice-president of the Foundation, Celeste Costantino.

What is emotional education?

This is a knowledge that includes pedagogy, sociology, sex education, psychology, civic education and Internet education. These courses are structured according to age groups. In countries that have already introduced this school subject, significant benefits have been recorded on the gender gap and gender imbalance indices in the workplace.

One criticism to be addressed is that a child’s education is their family’s responsibility.

Actually, it is increasingly the families who are asking for help from schools because within the vortex of violence that occurs that we already know about, there is also the digital violence that many parents do not have the tools to interpret. We also think of online pornography, of pre-teens exposed to images of sexual intercourse identified as rape. In the absence of education, the risks are all too evident.

Is there a risk of ideologizing girls and boys?

I answer you with the solution. As a foundation, we want facilitate this path to emotional education by theorizing a propaedeutic process of structuring this knowledge, from an academic and scientific point of view. Fears, even unfounded ones, are nurtured precisely in the absence of a law and an unambiguous education.

Do Christian thought and emotional education converge?

It comes natural to me to say yes. The real question is whether the Church is willing to take a step forward in deconstructing certain stereotypes of women, even in their role as mothers. For my father’s generation changing nappies would have been unthinkable, that is no longer the case.

Do you have an interlocutor with the Church?

There are individual instances, perhaps in border territories, which grasp the enormous scale of the problem and have decided to modernize, with an educational methodology that brings results. What is missing is a system, a real interlocutor. As a Catholic, I await a major transformation.

by Carmen Vogani
Journalist and author