The school as a place for a ‘social clinic’ (PolisAnalysis)

The school has remained the only incubator of semiotic capital - resources of meaning - and regenerator of social capital. Therefore, the task of the teacher-educator is primarily to ‘teach how to live’, i.e. to allow each individual to develop knowledge of himself and the link with others - others within himself and others outside himself - to prepare them to face the multiple uncertainties and difficulties of existence, coping with the sense of radical impotence and indefinability of the Self experienced by the ‘sovereign child’ who has now grown up. Central to this, will be a re-education as regards limits, mentalisation, caring for the common living space. To this end, even the learning-teaching process should be interpreted as something concerning above all the emotional-affective dynamics, largely unconscious, that configure the group network of relationships between all the actors on the school’s stage: transference, countertransference, collusions, the class-group as a single mind, the institution, the specific culture of each school. The teacher will be able to find in his own mind his main working tool, provided he has space and time to conscientise and metabolise what is acting in himself at an unconscious level, through appropriate group methodologies - Balint and Psychodrama. The student, on the other hand, will be helped to transition from a culture of fulfilment to feeling like a ‘client’ who experiences school as a time to cultivate himself and implement Relational Assets, such as reciprocity, cooperation and trust. It is about operating a real act as a ‘social clinic’.