I am 10 years old.
This is the audition day to enter the Scala Dance School of Milan.
I am walking up the steps of a huge stairway
which takes me to the exam room.
I am scared!
I am really scared,
and as I am walking up, I see a crowd of beautiful children.
These are the students of the Scala walking down,
they are all beautiful, thin, and perfect.
I am neither perfect nor particularly thin,
and I am starting to feel different.
At the top of the stairs,
stand two ladies with a rather frozen smile,
the same smile one needs to carry while dancing, having unbearable calf cramps.
That's ballet!
They tell me, "Here, come in."
This is a huge room with huge mirrors.
And I realize that we are some 20 little girls,
all rather terrified by this austere place.
The piano starts to play.
I remember it was "Nocturne" by Chopin.
It was beautiful!
The ladies tell us,
"Now you can dance your own way, barefoot."
Luckily enough I think, because at that moment,
I don't remember anything from my two years of dance classes
and I start dancing, I launch myself into dance,
propelled by the music.
And as I am dancing, I remember the comforting words
from my professor, my maestro, Maestro Morucci
when he used to say, "Listen, there are two important things:
technique and passion.
One day, they will come together as one."
"You have passion, it is your treasure."
Suddenly, with a hand-clap, the music stops.
Now we have to go through the inspection with these two ladies
still holding the same smile.
Then, one of them starts to examine my feet
and my legs, especially my feet.
She stares at them, and then she calls someone;
her friend or colleague tells her something that I don't understand.
She also asks me to turn around in front of her.
At that moment, the same impression of being different,
the one I felt in the staircase
when I was there, watching the students, comes back.
I must be someone very odd.
I think about my feet, they are really odd.
Secretly, I look at my friends' feet which seem,
of course, the most elegant in the world.
Fortunately, the inspection comes to its end.
Now, we have to go to another room, this one is a classroom.
This is the Scala Primary School pupils classroom.
And it is a classroom with old wooden benches,
a blackboard, a real classroom.
"Sit on the benches!" they command us, "Now we are going to call the roll!"
And as the names are called,
we are shown either the right side or the left side.
Then one of the ladies, still holding the same smile of course,
tells us, "Now, we have made our decision:
here on the right side, are the pupils we selected to enter the Scala,
and on the left, the ones that we, unfortunately, cannot take on.
You may leave."
I am on the left.
Suddenly, I realize why my feet have been under such a thorough examination,
and the confirmation of the fact that I am someone really odd comes.
All of a sudden, tears start running down my cheeks.
I remember, more than tears, those were desperate sobs.
Despite the tears,
I still manage to get down the stairs and get to the place
my mother has been waiting for me on the first floor,
and I tell her in a tired voice, "Mommy, I was turned down."
Suddenly, in a snap, my life, my beautiful world
of a little girl destined to be a dancer falls apart.
From good pupil, I turn into someone bad, a monster with ugly feet.
I still picture myself in the bus which was taking me home.
I was sobbing.
I also remember,
all these years when I had to wear sandals in summer,
I was ashamed of my feet, but I didn't know why.
No one ever told me.
And then, again, during at least 10 years after this episode,
my heart was breaking every time someone,
thinking it would please me, took me to a dance performance,
or whenever I saw one on TV.
The pain kept coming back, every time,
as if I had forgotten the meaning of the word "happiness",
as if I had lost the right to be happy.
Fortunately, time heals all wounds.
One day, I set myself free from this failure circle,
and I realized there were 1,000 ways to dance life.
And then, I realized something else:
that episode, this child wound had not broken one,
even two essential things to me:
the ability to dream and the love of life,
the one I felt when I was dancing.
So, as a young adult, and even now,
I started taking lessons, and I still continue to take dance lessons,
ballet, tango, tarantella...
I am not telling you all this to relate my life.
There is nothing extraordinary, it is normal, it is common.
It happened to me, it can happen to you,
or maybe it will happen to your children.
To me, there is absolutely nothing normal about that.
This episode is the expression of an ordinary cruelty
that our world, with our educational system ahead,
keeps inflicting on children, killing their ability to dream.
I cannot contribute to this.
I don't want to contribute to this.
So, when I started to be
able to decide for myself,
I went to the university.
I first made post-graduate studies,
and I wrote a thesis called "Educating to Joy".
What does "Educating to Joy" mean?
I first discovered that joy is my passion today.
And you wouldn't believe it,
but I discovered that the word "joy", its etymology in Sanskrit is "Yuj".
This means the link, it is a connection, a relation.
It's beautiful!
But what does being linked mean?
What is being linked? I think it is very simple.
I saw it in children, you experienced it too, I remember.
My body memory told me,
it was what I was experiencing while I was dancing and I watched the children,
while they are drawing, playing, doing things they particularly like,
they forget the world around them.
They are so absorbed that you can call them for two hours,
they can't hear you and they are learning without any fatigue.
That's great.
This relation takes me back
to what I experienced when I was dancing without fatigue.
It was to be in direct contact
with the world, the sky, and the earth,
with animals, flowers, people, with you.
What does it have to do with education?
A lot!
Because imagine, if we based education on that,
if we started from something that permaculture has already discovered;
permaculture, you know, is an ecological science.
Permaculture says, "Cultivate where it is already fertile."
Can you imagine what it would mean to start being able to learn
from our own richness and our treasure?
Revolutionizing education.
This would completely change the world.
It would also mean learning without any fatigue.
In the past, teachers, educators, philosophers,
had already understood this: Montessori, Steiner, Freinet.
They had understood, but they were not much listened to.
The good news is, today, more and more educators,
teachers, professors, parents,
not only have taken over these predecessors
but are inventing new educational practices.
I assure you that I see many, many of them.
These are people who invent new methods
that are all based on the freedom and respect of the child's rhythm
and the ability, their ability to dream.
My own joy is to connect,
to be in contact with this relation.
This is why, with a group of people who still know how to dream,
I founded an alliance,
an alliance for the renewal of education which is called the Spring of Education.
Because everything is already there, all we need to do is connect.
This is educating to joy.
After all, it is remembering Maria Montessori's words when she said,
"Joy of learning is as essential as intelligence,
as breathing is to runners and dancers!"
(Applause)