“It’s not just an act of revenge, it’s a way to break a boring routine in the most extreme way possible.” This is a key passage that emerged in the letter of the thirteen-year-old student who seriously stabbed his French teacher. An act that has shocked the world of adults and which must push us to question many of the founding principles of our relationship with adolescence. Starting from the lack of imputability under the age of fourteen, a threshold which seems to have been consciously exploited by the young man.

Boys grow faster

Today’s kids are not comparable to those of twenty years ago, or even to those of ten years ago. In the age of the internet and artificial intelligence they grow more rapidly in terms of knowledge of the world, but at the same time they appear increasingly fragile, afraid and, above all, frustrated by boredom. It is no coincidence, in fact, that this word emerges in the young man’s writing. The new generations are increasingly dependent on entertainment, on everything right away, on the continuous and incessant stimulation favored by the digital world. This is why they fear boredom more than any other form of discomfort and are willing to do anything to avoid experiencing it. In this context, violence can become a shortcut to “feel alive”, to break through the void of existential meaning that pervades them.

Boredom as an evolutionary tool

Yet boredom has always had an extraordinary adaptive and evolutionary role for human beings, especially in its ability to stimulate creativity and self-analysis. Not knowing how to stay in boredom also means losing the opportunity to know oneself. Time turns into something to be deceived and consumed in the most voracious way possible. Obviously, behind the tragedy in Bergamo, there are many other factors worthy of analysis: from bullying to the increasingly difficult relationship between students and teachers, who now seem to have lost mutual trust.

Social-emotional education

But a human being who is unable to manage boredom, to seek it out and even embrace it, is a potentially dangerous and unpredictable human being. It is therefore not enough to ban smartphones: it is necessary to bring an alternative to school that fills the void that they leave in students’ lives. We need to introduce social-emotional education not as a sporadic and unscheduled moment, but rather as a stable and structural dimension of the school career. Otherwise, unfortunately, let’s prepare ourselves to get used to a new normality made up of school violence that is increasingly devoid of limits and boundaries.