A-Infos (en) Sicilia Libertaria: Class school and global governance between old and new poverty - Livio Marchese (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The poverty of our century is different from the poverty of any other 
time. It is not, as in the past, the result of natural scarcity, but of 
a set of priorities imposed on the rest of the world by the rich. ----- 
Nicoletta Dentico, Rich and good? ---- After a long experience in the 
Turin suburbs, last year I obtained a transfer to a middle school in my 
city, Catania, in a neighborhood considered "at risk" (but not too much, 
in the sense that in the city there are well-established contexts 
worse). I well remember the amazement of many welcoming colleagues who, 
even today, continue to ask me why I left the North - whose schools, in 
the collective imagination of southern teachers who escaped the 
migrations imposed by ministerial algorithms, appear clean, tidy and 
equipped with the most innovative, attended by educated students, with a 
solid cultural background and eager to learn - for a context considered 
demeaning.

In reality I don't think I suffered any culture shock and the impact 
with the new school was not at all unsettling. From a structural point 
of view, first of all, the building, like those in the Turin 
neighborhoods where I taught, appears squalid, dirty and dusty, freezing 
in winter and scorching in summer. Perpetually humid. Smashed windows 
and shutters, broken doors or doors with faulty locks, peeling walls, 
inadequate heating, non-existent external lighting, frequent shortages 
of toilet paper or soap, entire wings abandoned. Missing, if nothing 
else, are those sinister gratings on the ground floor intended for 
defense against night-time attacks by vandals which give the similar 
buildings in the North a gloomy appearance of a place of detention. 
Common denominator: a general atmosphere of neglect, abandonment and 
demobilization, against which the useless efforts of numerically 
undersized and often poorly motivated school collaborators are 
shattered. The results of reporting the damage to the competent 
municipalities are similar between the North and the South. Punctually 
ignored.

And we come to the "human" aspect. Net of a preponderant presence in the 
northern suburbs of pupils of foreign origin alongside those of more or 
less remote southern origin, the social, cultural and economic 
background also appears similar: parents who are largely poorly literate 
and have a calibrated cultural background on television shows and social 
media, with precarious and low-income jobs, sometimes with some criminal 
record, who treat their children as equals, raising them above 
everything else, only to then delegate their educational function to the 
smartphone and the PlayStation. Textbooks are often considered 
superfluous - as is the entire educational aspect of school, considered 
like a baby-parking - and in many cases are not purchased, while 
i-phones, designer clothes, expensive hairstyles, unlikely cosmetic 
interventions and various fetishes of consumer society are always 
exhibited with ease by influencers. Many students demonstrate cognitive, 
attention and memory deficits, behavioral disorders and dysfunctions of 
various kinds. Difficulty in relating to the "other", aggression and 
quarrelsomeness, apathy and apathy, gambling addiction and addiction to 
video screens now represent the rule rather than the exception. There is 
also a worrying increase in the case of students with an inverted 
circadian rhythm: they sleep during the day - even at school - and spend 
the night on digital devices. To be honest, there are significant 
exceptions of families who make many sacrifices for their children and 
who still believe in the value of school and its role - once essential, 
now who knows - as a social lift. However, despite themselves, they have 
to clash with a school system that advertises itself as "inclusive" for 
everyone, but which in fact is "exclusive" precisely for those few who 
really want to learn.

Teaching in the suburbs of big cities - both in the North and in the 
South - becomes more and more difficult every year. My response to my 
colleagues, therefore, is always the same. In the general disaster of 
society and, specifically, of the Italian school system, perpetrated 
indiscriminately by all the ministers of public education who have 
succeeded one another from the Berlinguer Reform to today, with the 
complicity of the major trade unions, if we want to talk about class 
dialectics - and it is necessary to talk about it because the Italian 
school today is classist as never before - it should be identified not 
so much in a phantom North-South opposition - as the questionable 
Invalsi statistics would like, among other things -, but in a dialectic 
within the cities themselves, between "centre" (or at most "residential 
neighbourhoods") and "suburbs". Put in brutal terms: our country 
guarantees quality education - of course, always according to the 
technocratic and developmentalist business model imposed by the EU and 
the 2030 Agenda - in adequate and hospitable structures for the children 
of the rich or for the increasingly fewer children of the good 
bourgeoisie, destined to replenish the fortunes of their families of 
origin; all the others spend their days bivouacking, insulting and 
beating each other in dangerous caves where the daily physical survival 
- of the pupil, the teacher and the school assistant - appears to be 
anything but a foregone conclusion. In short, the situation seems 
desperate and the social gap is growing ever wider. But here, 
fortunately, the infamous "external" projects intervene to provide 
valuable support in alleviating inequalities, evidently intolerable for 
the high and magnanimous spheres of the new global governance...

A few days after arriving at the new institute I learned that our school 
had been chosen, together with one hundred other "lucky" Italian 
institutes located in "at risk" areas, for an experimental project 
promoted by one of the most important NGOs in at an international level 
close to the United Nations, in partnership with a research group close 
to an equally renowned university in the North, aimed at combating 
"digital educational poverty". The reflections on this concept and on 
the entire project deserve much more discussion. Here I would like to at 
least underline on the one hand the senseless absurdity of an 
intervention regarding "digital educational poverty" in school contexts 
deprived of everything, attended by pupils - pre-adolescents often 
without space-time coordinates and semi-illiterate - who ask for meaning 
of words such as "highway", "station" or "orchard" - only to then not 
listen to the answer because they are distracted by other mental pop-ups 
- and in which overexposure to digital represents one of the most 
evident causes of the disarming conditions of students; on the other, 
the slimy hypocrisy that lies behind the post-colonial plots of global 
philanthrocapitalism, which with its right hand creates a social, 
cultural and economic inequality never experienced in another era and 
with its left distributes the rope to hang yourself as if it were a 
lifeline.

The usual myth of development and innovation at all costs, the panacea 
for every social evil, reigns undisputed over everything. The dominant 
logic, however, is always the same: change everything so that nothing 
changes.

Livio Marchese

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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