A-Infos (en) Sicilia Libertaria: Inequality grows, class education is strengthened - Giovanna Lo Presti (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Many years ago, around 2009 - it was the time of the Gelmini "reform", 
one of the many legislative disasters that have befallen Italian schools 
since 2000 - I wrote a few pages, which I titled "From class school to 
school class". The meaning of my reasoning is therefore clear from the 
title: Italy started from a class school, so to speak the pre-1968 
school, and arrived at a class school, that of today. However, there has 
been a long journey involved and, although the landing point is the 
same, differences and new situations have arisen. I need the preamble to 
clarify that, when talking about class school, we are referring to a 
medium-long term phenomenon, which starts from the beginning of the 
twentieth century and has long touched our present. Since the state 
school is the main Italian educational institution, it will not be 
surprising that a classist society corresponds to a classist school: the 
more vague and inoperative certain key concepts become in society, such 
as that of equality (not only formal) between citizens, the more the 
school will adapt to this social order. But let's start from objective 
data. We can affirm that the only reform that has changed Italian 
schools in a progressive sense was the one that, in 1962, established 
the single middle school, as a single, free and compulsory path for boys 
and girls aged 11 to 14. Keeping the children together, regardless of 
their social class of origin, at least for three years, seemed - and was 
- a democratic achievement. The single middle school is an important 
piece of that mosaic of social initiatives that made the decade that 
followed a period marked by a strong emancipatory push. The class 
school, however, was certainly not eradicated forever. Indeed, the 
single middle school itself was indicated as a potentially regressive 
factor: to affirm this, not even fifteen years after 1962, a 
non-conformist and acute intelligence was needed. It was Pier Paolo 
Pasolini who suggested a radically paradoxical way out to overcome what 
he saw as an unsustainable state of corruption of consciences, in an 
attempt to stem the monstrous "anthropological mutation" which had as 
its result the brutalization of the youth masses and "a widespread 
criminal or criminaloid behaviour".

The "modest proposal" to abolish middle school and television caused a 
scandal. Pasolini's last intervention on this theme appears in the 
Corriere della Sera on 29 October 1975. Compulsory schooling, the 
results of which Pasolini sees with a sharp eye, cannot do anything 
other than create "a small bourgeois slave in place of a free 
proletarian or sub-proletarian (i.e. belonging to another culture, which 
leaves him a virgin to understand new real things)[...]. Furthermore, 
reaching the eighth grade or, better yet, the fifteenth grade, is 
evidently the optimum": but for now, Pasolini insists, it is better to 
abolish compulsory schooling, "while waiting for better times; that is, 
of another development. (This is the crux of the matter)1 After more 
than half a century, "the crux of the question" remains the same: to 
change the school, the socio-economic structure must be changed. Mass 
schooling is an (almost) accomplished fact but the drift of Italian 
schools is becoming more and more evident from year to year. The many 
wasted words, the various attempts at "school reform from above", the 
laudable but useless attempts at "reform from below" have only served to 
hide the hard truth and that is that the school limits itself to 
accepting the requests of the productive system. The links between 
school and the world of work exist and are very strong, but it is not 
the school that establishes their nature. For an unstructured world, in 
which the condition of a growing number of human beings is becoming 
increasingly precarious, what is needed is not a good school but a 
school that is effectively preparatory to the "liquidity" of the world 
of work, a school that trains existential "flexibility". In the three 
decades of the "inglorious thirty years", we have witnessed the 
affirmation of an idea of knowledge submitted to the needs of the 
economy, of a knowledge which, in the renunciation of the solid 
structure which guarantees its transmission from one generation to the 
next, finds the main figure of its "modernity". Our "mass school" 
prepares us, more or less consciously, for this - which is, of 
necessity, a class school, created to train a limited ruling class and 
large subordinate strata, whose fragmentary and approximate education is 
a good viaticum for the acceptance of an existential condition without 
certainties, which can fall at any moment into the abyss of a "life of 
waste", to quote Bauman.

According to the Invalsi 20222 tests, which involved students in the 
last year of secondary school, "52% of students reach at least the basic 
level in Italian": that is to say, 48% of our graduating students do NOT 
reach the basic level and therefore is unable to understand a banal 
journalistic article. As regards the family of origin, "the share of 
graduates with graduate parents behind them ranges from 42.4% of high 
school graduates (with peaks of 66.7% among classical graduates and 
48.4% among scientific graduates) to 18.1% of technicians and 13.2% of 
professional paths". Social background also has a strong impact on 
achieving top marks at high school diploma. What happens one year after 
graduation? "The share of graduates dedicated exclusively to university 
studies is significantly higher among high school graduates (65.7%) 
compared to technical (33.5%) and professional graduates (19.4%)". This 
is what "class school" is.

For many reasons the school does not fulfill its emancipatory mandate. 
Yet, although it is difficult, we must focus on it as a place where 
education can train individuals animated by the desire to make the world 
in which they live better. We must not lose faith: tomorrow's adults are 
formed at school and sowing egalitarian ideas, opening up to love for 
Nature and what is beautiful, giving rise to the desire to know is no 
small thing. School workers must demand dignified working and study 
conditions without forgetting that, in an asphyxiated world, in which 
the virtual overlaps and is confused with the real and knowledge is 
considered useless old iron, replaced as it is by information just in 
time and on demand provided by the Internet, the teacher has the duty to 
indicate another way of being, in which the distortions of the present 
are eliminated in the name of a less unjust, less violent - in short, 
more humane society.

1Pasolini, P.P. (1976), Lutheran Letters, Turin, Einaudi, 1976, pp. 
168-169 - the underlining of "other" is by Pasolini.

2The data reported here are taken from the results of the Invalsi tests 
and from the Profile of the 2022 graduates which can be found on the 
website 
https://www.almadiploma.it/info/pdf/scuole/profilo2022/02_Profilo%20dei%20Diplomati%202022.pdf

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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