"Be Good, Boys & Girls"

Like many another schoolboy, Giuseppe Conte, 16, a sophomore at Rome's Leonardo da Vinci High School, felt misunderstood. He was sure, for instance, that his math teacher had it in for him. He was always prepared, Giuseppe assured his parents, but Professor Renzo Modugno, a crippled war veteran, twisted the questions so he couldn't possibly answer. Last week, when the semester's grades were announced, Giuseppe heard that he had flunked his math. To make matters worse, Professor Modugno humiliated him by announcing that even the failing grade was higher than he deserved. Giuseppe walked home brooding over the injustice of it all. He pried open the locked chest that contained his father's pistol, put the 7.65 Browning automatic in his pocket and went back to his afternoon classes.

Cold Steel & Cowardice. When the math lesson ended, Giuseppe put his hand on the bulge in his pocket and left the classroom. Out in the corridor, Professor Modugno leaned against the door to light a cigarette. Giuseppe calmly took aim and tired three shots which hit his teacher in the right lung, the skull and the groin After giving himself up, he said he had planned to kill himself too, but decided it would be cowardly.

Professor Modugno regained consciousness only long enough to forgive Giuseppe before he died. Huge bareheaded crowds turned out to watch while schoolboys carried the coffin through Rome's silent streets. At the professor's bier in the Piazza di Spagna, Mayor Salvatore Rebecchini spoke for all high-school teachers: "Be good, boys and girls, be good."

Guns & Slingshots. But Rome's students did not see to pay attention. Hardly had the bells stopped tolling when another schoolboy, Filiberto Accica came home to weep over his failing grades in Latin and Greek. All day and all night he shut himself in his room, brooding as Giuseppe had. On Sunday morning, in the bright spring sunshine, he opened his window and jumped to his death. For his Greek professor, Filiberto left a note: "I do not kill you, I kill myself."

All last week the Italian press cried for school reform Said the Demo-Christian Il Popolo: "The youth of today finds his moral support in a society of comic books movies and shows . . . where men & women shoot and poison, steal and assault; the representation of a jungle world." We are all convinced," said Milan's Corriere delta Sera, "that the Italian school program is loaded in a frightening manner. We must impose a remedy." Shrilled the Communist L'Unit`a: "The responsibility lies with the system in which we live, which transforms the school into a camp of ruthless competition for diplomas." But until school reform got under way L'Europeo had some advice for Italian school kids: "Away with guns and back to the slingshot."

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