Despite its title, this is not a book about school. It's a book about failure—about the suffering of not understanding, and the wreckage it leaves behind. Most of us carry some piece of Pennac's experience as a struggling student: the loneliness of falling behind, the conviction that we could manage if only we tried harder, the sense that others don't understand us, the wound of rejection, the way we're shut out from the world of the accomplished and the great. And yet—there's also a defiant joy, the kind a struggling student gets punished for. Who hasn't felt these things at least once? This book holds up a mirror to that part of ourselves we wish to redeem and improve. Drawing from his own painful years as a student, Pennac traces the path that led him out—and reflects on the teachers who saw him, and the tools they used to draw him forward. One noticed his gift for inventing excuses. Rather than shame him, this teacher gave him an assignment: write stories, regularly. The boy who had been unreliable suddenly kept a deadline because the work delighted him. He began to trust himself. Another teacher, his mathematics instructor, faced a classroom of students without any foundation. He promised them he would bring them to passing. No lectures about their predecessors' failures or their own lack of effort. Just work, side by side, until he kept his word.
For Pennac, this is what love means: attention to the struggling child, faith that he can learn, conviction that he already knows more than he believes. Working hard to draw out his gifts, to develop what he already possesses. A love lived out daily, concretely, in the seriousness and steadiness with which a teacher can explain grammar as if it were a gripping novel about students' lives and feelings.
Consider the power of vague pronouns—ci, ne, tutto, questo—in sentences like "I'll never get there, professor" or "I don't care anymore" or "None of this matters anyway." Write them carefully on the board, once a student speaks them aloud in despair, so you can see them, analyze them, "open them up." For some students, ci carries the raw sting of a failed math problem or a grammar lesson. Ne means the daily confirmation of failure, the humiliation, the contempt adults have for him. These words lead to "a refusal to try to understand this massive nothing that serves no purpose, a constant longing to be elsewhere, to do something else, anywhere else, anything but this."
Throughout the book, the various teachers who rescue students from school employ a kind of art of drawing-out. Each in their own subject, they help the student discover that he is a mathematician, a historian, a writer—or, as in Ali's case, a screenwriter and director.
Against these luminous figures, Pennac sets others—like "Marketing Grandma," who doesn't see the student as a person but as a potential consumer, useful as a walking billboard for her brands. She's content to make him feel worthless, because worthlessness makes an excellent target. And sadly, it's not only Marketing Grandma who profits from such despair. Crime and corruption do as well.
The book is an essay that reads like a novel—light yet profound—and it is a declaration of love. It is dedicated to all those who are different, and to the conviction that every marginalized person deserves the chance to discover meaning in their life.
Flavia Cinotti and Cristina Tersigni, 2008