Why the Italian school debate has flared up

For a few days now, panic has been spreading in the virtual world over the new guidelines that Minister Valditara has announced for secondary schools.
There is talk of Latin and Bible reading as if they were new compulsory courses imposed on everyone. There are fears of a ban on teaching the history of countries outside Western Europe. One takes the opportunity to show off one’s values by launching alternative counter-proposals: “Other than Latin, we would need computer science!” “Forget the Bible, we need statistics!” “Forget history, that would take economics!“. Under the persistent illusion that our children are like smartphones on which the school is asked to install one or the other application, many have proposed their favourite range of applications, which, in their plans, should mechanically create a more modern, richer, fairer or more humane society.
Of course, in the real world, things are quite different.
Ministerial ‘programmes‘ have not existed for decades. Teachers enjoy total didactic autonomy, with respect to which the ministers who take turns in Viale Trastevere can at most propose ‘indications’ or ‘guidelines’ that list suggestions or non-binding options.
I always take the same example: most history teachers insist on not dealing with the facts of the second half of the twentieth century in defiance of any ‘indications’ or ‘guidelines’ that may have been issued on their subject.
We are ready to bet, therefore, that Valditara’s ‘return to the dark ages’ will be reduced to the advice to read, if one wishes, a few pages of the Bible to clarify literary or historical topics, to do, if one wishes, a little history in detail instead of superficial smatterings, and to add, if one wishes, some rudiments of Latin to Italian grammar. Initiatives that, moreover, many middle school teachers already take spontaneously.
This storm in a glass, however, has revealed for the umpteenth time how much the Italian public still has an outdated, centralised and clerical idea about schools. People imagine a ministry that gives orders and 800,000 teachers who carry them out like diligent workers in a workshop: an image that did not correspond to reality even in the days of the book Cuore.

And so they all argue about‘whatshould be done inschools‘ and‘what should not be done in schools‘, with a patronising and indoctrinating attitude that I find frankly discouraging.
Not an exception, unfortunately, are friends who on any other subject defend the free market. They clamour for schools with modern foreign languages, schools with statistics, with economics, with IT…
Well, these dream schools exist: they are, with different nuances, the technical-economic institute and the economic-social high school. The problem is that they are chosen by 12% and 4% of new entrants respectively: in short, they are defeated every year by the very market.
Faced with this snub, even the most orthodox liberalist loses his temper and demands that his favourite subjects be imposed by force on any student. Forgetting, in his eagerness, the very elementary lessons of economics to which he attaches so much importance: in this case, the problems that arise when one tries to force thousands of consumers to buy a scarce good.
In short: even if compulsory IT were introduced in all schools, where would the tens of thousands of adults capable of programming but willing to be teachers at €1,500 a month be found instead of using their talents more fruitfully?
How many economics graduates would foreclose higher-paid careers to swamp themselves in school? Today, there is already a dramatic shortage of maths and science teachers: wouldn’t making disciplines such as statistics compulsory only exacerbate the famine?
In conclusion, it pains me to admit it, but the limping Italian school still has a more liberal, more secular and more realistic approach to education than much of the society around it.
Sixty-eight culture achieved a double masterpiece: on the one hand, it moulded the Italian school in its own image and likeness, making it easy, nurturing, decentralised and permeable to any open-minded political campaign (to the point that, in drawing up the Educational Offer Plan of my high school, I had to specify what the activities for ‘overcoming anthropocentrism‘ were); on the other hand, however, it took care not to let anyone know.
Thus the vast majority of the country continues to think that Italian children attend a school that is authoritarian, top-down and nailed in the past, the heirs of the Sixty-Eighters can continue to shout their slogans as if their battle were still to be won, and the singers of globalised capitalism can imagine as their only alternative a school that is just as authoritarian and top-down even if it is projected into the future.
A true masterpiece, which our children are paying for.
