Conference Program

This contribution starts from a question that emerged from the encounter with students' metaphors and silences: what are we really evaluating when we measure school experience? Behind grades, learning outcomes, and standardized performances, what remains unheard?

Drawing on a school guidance project launched in 2024 involving over 300 high school students in Italy, the paper explores how a performative logic pervades contemporary school experience. The interpretations presented are not imposed from above but emerge from a situated, participatory process based on students’ responses to open-ended questionnaires, revisited in classroom workshops, and negotiated with students through dialogue. This methodological approach ensures that students' voices are not merely illustrated but actively shape the analysis.

The findings suggest that performative pressures operate on two interconnected fronts: emptying the future of orientation while crushing the present under the weight of bureaucratic, impersonal, and relentless evaluation. On one side, the future becomes evanescent. Students describe school as an "exercise bike" on which they "pedal a lot but remain stationary", a "hell where, at the end of it all, there is light", a "roundabout" where, not knowing which direction to take, they "keep going round in circles". They invest effort without real belief and work without a clear horizon. When asked about their dreams and their likely future jobs, a consistent gap emerges: the multiplicity of possible futures (MotoGP racing, K-pop idol, tattooing) collides with the pragmatism of the "Plan B" (kindergarten teacher, choreographer). The future is not a project but a source of anxiety – too distant, too uncertain, too abstract to grasp.

On the other side, the present is saturated with judgment. Students' most difficult moments are almost always moments of evaluation: the first failure ("the first 3.5"), the accumulation of tests, the threat of being held back. The pervasiveness of evaluative anxiety extends beyond grades to the very relationship with teachers: students describe being "targeted", "humiliated", "abandoned". One student, reflecting on a teacher's comment – "what kind of man will you become?" – adds: "I would kill myself if I were held back." Another recalls: "no teacher wanted to help me, and I felt abandoned to myself."

In this context, authenticity – understood in a Sartrean sense as the capacity to assume responsibility for one's own choices and future – becomes a fragile and conflictual process. Students are asked to project themselves into an uncertain future while being constantly judged in a present they struggle to inhabit.