Early in the book, a paraplegic boy asks his new teacher: "Will you stay with us, or will you leave too?" To this question—which echoes another, more famous one—the author answers: "No, I'll stay." And she did. For ten years, she fought alongside her colleagues to make this work inside a public school. Her testimony deserves to be read with great respect and care.
Elena Corsani helped organize an experimental program for students with motor disabilities at a secondary school in Turin. Together with a small school in Crema, it was the only one addressing the inclusion of disabled students over fourteen in vocational and academic training.
It is genuinely valuable, then, to follow the author's account of how the initiative began, what inspired it, how lessons were organized, what special services were put in place, and how non-disabled students were integrated. The author does not hide the real difficulties and occasional setbacks: the indifference of some teachers, tensions with able-bodied classmates, inadequate building infrastructure, transportation problems. These are serious obstacles, but not insurmountable—not when teachers and students face them with calm and constructive resolve.
The students in this story range from fourteen to eighteen or twenty years old. Many of them, after finishing lower secondary school, had been left to themselves for years with no chance to study or train for work. They are adolescents carrying the strain, hopes, and conflicts of their age. But more than that, they are young people who have lived through years of suffering and broken promises—complicated surgeries, long and pointless rounds of treatment—and who now, at this crucial moment, begin to imagine their future without the illusions that once sustained them. They are ready to accept their condition with greater realism, sometimes with calm acceptance, provided no one deceives them anymore, provided they are not treated with false or useless pity. What they need is what they deserve: the tools to prepare for work that will make them economically independent. These are the real reasons not to abandon them—to offer them, precisely when so many doors are closing, new knowledge and new perspectives, realistic goals that are modest but useful and achievable, goals that honor both their real capacities and their real hopes.
The second part of the book takes up broader questions that face all young people with disabilities, whatever their circumstances or surroundings. Through individual moments or the behavior of particular students, the author shares their hopes, their fears, their faith, their loneliness, their sexual desire, their courage, and their maturity. These pages carry the force of truth and love.
Some readers might find certain passages intense or some descriptions overly realistic. But the question of disability includes the physical reality, the curious stares, the careless words. There is no point in silence or pretense. So, as the young people in this book teach us through their intelligent courage, we must face reality as it is, alongside them. We must even learn to understand the language of others—the able-bodied—because as Gianni, who has severe muscular dystrophy, says: "We have to understand them. They don't know all the things we know."
- Maria Teresa Mazzarotto, 1988