School registers are made to record the students’ absences and grades. But not all students are equal, not all of them are given the same opportunities. In this journey lasting over a century, teachers, children, parents from every part of Italy reconstruct the history of compulsory schooling, and their personal experiences, great expectations and deeply-felt disappointments.

DIRECTOR'S NOTES:
Talking about school, especially elementary school, is one way of describing a country, a country that grows (or retrogresses) with its school system. This school register contains all of the twentieth century through the sixties, when television became the big blackboard… Even though compulsory schooling was clearly defined by law, need, poverty, wars, led education to be considered as something superfluous and just for the wealthy, something most of society was excluded from or voluntarily ignored, as if it were an obligation and not a right. The class registers, half a century ago, took note of the father’s profession (never the mother’s, mothers “did not work”…). On the basis of this profession, of this role in the community, the students were distributed into the various classes and assigned this rather than that teacher. This “archive film” intends to narrate the past to focus attention on the present, because certain types of discrimination never die, they just change their aspect, and the problems reappear in different forms. This is food for thought for people who firmly believe in the school system and know that the future begins at school, that in school lie the seeds of conquest.