Posted by frommal on Monday, May 30, 2016 in Blog posts.

I interviewed Marco Garofalo on May 27^th, 2016 from 5:06pm until 6:18pm. Marco is a 34 year old bar manager who was born in Cefalù. Marco has two younger brothers. His mother was a teacher and his father was a government official. Throughout his life, he has focused on finding happiness. He has met people all over the world, and has chosen whom he wants in his life and whom he does not.

Since he started school, he has been a strong student. We discussed the school system in depth throughout our hour together. There is a difference between the school system in Italy as a whole, and in Cefalù. He compared this to living in New York and how my life style is different from someone who is from Nebraska. For the purpose of this interview, he focused on his experience in the Cefalù education system.

Before primary school, there is a school for young children and babies. This school was created to help the mothers of these children. This being said, this school is important because it is where you make your first connections. This is similar to preschool in America. Next is primary school. This starts around the age of seven and focuses on reading, writing, and geography. He thinks that the geography program in primary school is one of the biggest strengths of the primary schools in Sicily. Scuola media is the same for everybody. You start around the age of 11 or 12 and then you go for about three years. For high school, you pick a school. The schools differ depending on subject, so you pick a school depending on what you want to be. This is where the American and Italian systems start to differ. Some schools are technical schools, accounting schools, classical schools, languages schools, or mathematics and physics schools. Marco went on to study the classics.

His personal opinion is that the school system is Sicily is debilitated by the bureaucracy because it is extremely difficult to navigate. Bureaucracy here exists in all elements of someone’s life. He expects that there will be an economic crash soon because money is just being moved around and not made. This is due to the fact that the bureaucratic systems are blocking productivity and advancement. A great example is the police system. Instead of one police force, there are more than seven different types of police forces. The question is why? A system has been created to produce jobs, but then when people enter the jobs they are not doing much. In order to compensate, the Italian government creates high taxes, leading to some of the highest taxes in the world. One major problem of the education system relates to this system of bureaucracy. It takes so long to get your diploma and become a certified teacher that most teachers are in their 70s. Marco said, “I would look at these teachers and say you are 68 years old and you have never left Cefalù. They are too closed-minded. In the end, what can they really teach me?”

The next problem he has with the school system deals with what is learned. Children who are born into this system must go above and beyond to succeed. If you want to do something important or be the best person you can be, you must find your way and learn through experiences outside of the school. It is crucial that students travel the world and figure out how to find information from locations other than school. Marco has learned everything he knows from traveling the world and teaching himself. He believes that Americans are significantly more pragmatic, and was unsure if I would even be able to understand what he was talking about.

A final problem that he pointed out is that you have to decide your career path at too young of an age. Especially in Cefalù, you have a lot of respect for your family, so you do what they tell you to do. Marco chose to switch to engineering at the university level because he did not feel like he belonged in the classics. Making this switch was extremely difficult because most people went to an engineering high school. When choosing a university, most students from Cefalù know nothing about universities. This means you choose your path based off of absolutely nothing! There are more than twenty types of engineering in Sicily and no one ever explained the difference to him. This makes it impossible to know what is best for you, so you are just forced to guess. In the end you never are sure what you want to do at the time the decision has to be made. He believes it would be better if there was one year where everyone got a base education, so they could get a better sense of where their interests and strengths lie. This was the concept I struggled with the most. I am 20 years old and have one year until I enter the workforce. Almost every student at Vanderbilt is trying to find their way, and figure out who they want to be and what they want to make of their lives. We are not forced to make this decision until we graduate, and even then mobility is more than doable, it is common. Working in one field for your whole life is no longer the norm here. However, Sicilians are forced to start making those life decisions before they enter high school.

The toughest decision came when he decided that engineering was not the right career path for him. Marco ended up traveling the world and working in bars. He would work at a bar for five months, then switch to another one. Marco considers his true passion to be acting, but at the time the decision had to be made, his parents advised against this. His parents believed that it was important to have a job that is fixed and had zero fear of failure. This is an idea that belongs to the older generations, but it is continually being passed on. He found this to be the problem. This makes life boring! In America we believe in the American Dream, and if you are good at your job you can get promoted. If you are not, you can get fired. This stresses personal responsibility, which is absent in Italian culture. In Italy, having a safe and reliable job is stressed. He feels that this is the cancer of Italy. When his father died he decided to live his life as best he could. If he had to spend money, he wanted to spend it on becoming a better person.

The main thought that I was left with at the end of the interview was that as much as he focused on the flaws of Italy, he still gave me a book about Cefalù at the end of the interview. He prides himself on being Sicilian. He gave me this book because he wants me to understand and appreciate the culture here in Cefalù. I left having a lot of respect for Sicilian culture because despite people feeling the need to leave to enhance their lives, the community in Cefalù keeps pulling them back. Most Americans do not feel this same connection to the community they grew up in.