Being fully alive to change the world

The ‘great distraction’, which we propose as a pedagogical and existential category, seems to represent a dangerous new paradigm of our times: it is the assiduousness of diversion from the self, the continuous being moved elsewhere, the pervasive inducement to evade the here and now, the retreat of the finest human energies towards stasis. It is then necessary and urgent to ask: how can full presence be fostered, in everyday life and particularly in educational contexts? In the present study, through the reflections of classical authors and Edgar Morin's Complex Thought, we highlight how a poetic education (i.e. one that cultivates and enhances the mimetic faculty and aesthetic participation to reality) enables an intensification of the quality of being there and being together, and thus of presence. An example of poetic education is given at the end of the study by recounting the experience of the educational project ‘The Stone in the Pond. In movement between words and stories’, an experiment carried out in a number of Italian high schools in which expressive reading was the main way of encouraging students’ full presence and helping them to manifest it.