Roots in the sky. When Tightrope walking meets Education

Our research aims to investigate the relationship between Education and Tightrope walking. Supporting the idea that education should favour a vital balance for each human being (Durand 1995; Jousse 1979) and considering tightrope walking as one of the best examples of seeking balance (Petit 2014), the paper analyses the tightrope walker's self-training. In fact, we have chosen to study this topic as a peculiar educational experience, considering balance as a permanently dynamic condition and a target for every educational process. The tightrope walking experience is as intense as any other performing art, and the performer acts in a condition described as a flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1990), a state in which people are completely engaged in what they are doing. This experience must be supported by the cognitive faculty of imagination, because the tightrope walker is led by an insane dream, that of connecting something that is naturally detached. Something in the performer's imagination must be true and real (Brooke 2012), something has to generate a transformation, because his performance puts his life in real danger: across life and death. In the same way, education has to be balanced in order to guide every human being