Matteo, a gifted student who dropped out of high school: “They told me that being too intelligent is a problem”

For Matteo Fabbri, PhD student in Cyber ​​Security, who a 24 years he has a degree in Philosophy in Bologna and a master’s degree at the Normale di Pisa in his curriculum, obtained at the same time as the Master of Science in Social Science of the Internet at Oxford, the above-average IQ represented an enormous difficulty.

It seems a paradox, but it was his own teachers who told him that “being too smart was a problem”, as the student told Republic: after the third year, he dropped out of classical high school Ariosto of Ferrara, his city. «I was good and I didn’t hide it, from the second year I started to suffer acts of bullying from my companions, never direct offenses but which weighed on me in a context in which I was isolated. I didn’t share interests with anyone in the class, they went to the disco or the cinema, I would have preferred to practice spoken Latin. I suffered a lot from this isolation, even the professors started not considering me anymorethey told me I was a sharp and implacable judge because sometimes I corrected them too».

Isolated and misunderstood, «I was not valued for my abilities, if anything I needed accelerated programs, they ignored me. They wouldn’t even let me talk anymore, a pain for me, I asked myself: so why am I studying? And when you lose the meaning you lose all motivation », she explains.

Matteo then decided to leave school. «I had been killed as a person by a school system that was not made for people like me, I was in crisis and I was afraid of finding myself in the same situation in other high schools. Like this I studied alone, at home, with the books and programs I knew I had to follow. Loneliness weighed on me, I worked as a collaborator for a local newspaper and attended a sports group».

At the Maturity, Matteo presented himself as an external candidateand graduated with 95, «a result defined by a Latin and Greek commissioner as “more unique than rare” for an autodidact».

Teaching should be personalized, according to him. «Students are not all the same, there are those who struggle and those who want to speed up, I think teaching should be personalizedthis means valuing merit: not allowing anyone to leave».

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