A-Infos (en) Sicilia Libertaria: On the classist school that trains - Angelo Barberi (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Just over a month ago I happened to attend a meeting held by the local 
section of the Lions club entitled "From the culture of rights to the 
culture of duties" in the school where I teach - a professional 
institute. The main speaker, who seemed to manifest, albeit confusedly, 
an organic vision of the State, the incarnation of that Leviathan 
capable of dominating primordial instincts, attempted to convince an 
audience made up of boys and girls between the ages of seventeen and 
eighteen of the importance of taking on duties constitutionally 
prescribed, the true glue of a community, rather than claiming rights of 
all kinds which now only create confusion and disintegration. Naturally 
he didn't succeed and some girls and boys openly contested it, observing 
how young people find themselves living in increasingly precarious 
conditions, therefore what rights and what duties did we want to talk 
about if not even the most basic needs are possible today satisfy. Among 
the revealing moments of the meeting were those in which the speaker 
addressed the audience directly in these terms: "you who will be the 
future ruling class". Now a similar statement, aimed at young people who 
at most aspire to become owners of an artisan workshop, a bar, a 
trattoria, a restaurant, or in most cases are content with finding 
manual employment, or entering the law enforcement agencies, can only be 
the result of bad faith, bad conscience or hypocrisy.

Whether the speaker's hypocrisy or bad faith, or both, matters little, 
what is certain is that Italian public schools continue to be 
ferociously classist. And it has never stopped being so, despite that 
school for all that seemed likely to be achieved at the end of the 
seventies of the last century. But even more, today's Italian school 
appears first and foremost to be a "regime" school, whose main task is 
to train the new generations in the "democratic" creed, of an 
increasingly faded democracy, just as any regime trains own values, or 
rather imposes them as the only ones. Now legality, citizenship, 
inclusiveness represent an easy creed to impart to the new generations: 
empty principles completely disconnected from reality.

A reality that instead marks growing inequalities and a continuous 
haemorrhage of rights. If it is true that all the statistics confirm the 
fact that if you come from an economically and culturally disadvantaged 
family - to adopt bureaucratic language - your destiny is largely 
sealed, it is in the living body of society that the class dimension 
emerges throughout its evidence. In thirty years of teaching in 
technical and professional institutes I have only rarely had to deal 
with students whose parents were graduates and I would say none whose 
parents belonged to the phantom ruling class, even if of low local rank. 
It certainly happens that among high school students there are children 
of the proletariat, but this is precisely an exception. The boys and 
girls who arrive at professional institutes instead seem to be the 
result of an educational path marked from the early years by 
difficulties, lack of tools and stimuli, condescension, flattening. The 
Italian school is structured to produce similar results. Even if in 
recent decades the prejudices of the old-fashioned school have been 
replaced by a falsely open and "inclusive" pedagogism - the game school, 
the attractive school - which rather than breaking social patterns and 
consolidated structures, confirms and strengthens them. I'm certainly 
not arguing that the school of notions and failures was better, but 
assuming "libertarian" principles in a bureaucratized and authoritarian 
structure is just hypocrisy. After all, no one, among governments or 
institutional parties, wants a school that truly transmits autonomy of 
thought and critical skills, indeed the school of recent years, of the 
various Gelmini, Renzi, etc. reforms, has increasingly been structured 
as a training school in a broad sense: obsequious citizens of abstract 
values and operators more or less functional to the production system. 
Whether all this is ultimately an ideological cover, in fact you want to 
provide soft or hard skills for a mobile job market mainly interested in 
low-cost labour, doesn't matter.

Some general lines are being traced here, which should be explored in 
greater depth, but the direction of today's school is clear and young 
people from professional institutes represent it with "consistency": 
absolute devaluation of general/cultural knowledge, greater appreciation 
of specialist knowledge, acquisition of the elusive skills to use in the 
world of work. Net of a disenchantment towards the future whose only 
aspiration is represented by the "permanent position" in the police 
force. Probably all this is more true from a southern perspective, but 
social hierarchies are well defined everywhere and the division between 
elite and mass is very rigid, in spite of all the constitutions in the 
world and any empty principle of equality and freedom.

The classist direction of the school is about to be accelerated by the 
introduction of a new reform of the technical and professional 
institutes, foreseen by the Pnrr, and by the launch of the so-called 
orientation teaching. There is no space here to examine the government 
reform bill in detail, but to give a sense of the function that we want 
to attribute to technical and professional schools, for which among 
other things four-year and the simultaneous creation of new high 
training institutes lasting two years, just read this statement by 
Minister Valditara, reported by the Orizzonte scuola website, "It is a 
reform that offers extraordinary opportunities to our young people, 
allowing many more job opportunities, and with faster entry times. It 
serves to qualify them in line with the needs of the business world. And 
this also means increasing the competitiveness of businesses."

The other piece of this economic vision of the school is represented by 
the orientation guidelines, adopted with Ministerial Decree 22 December 
2022 n. 38, and ministerial circular no. 2790 of 11 October 2023. The 
two provisions, issued to carry out the "orientation reform", should in 
the intentions of the ministry revolutionize the way of teaching, for 
which the sole objective becomes to train students for inclusion in the 
world of work; a school therefore conceived as a system that must create 
a reliable and guaranteed product to be supplied to businesses. Above 
all, willing to accept any working conditions and not to demand too many 
rights.

If it's not this classy school! Whose task is it to subvert such an 
understanding?

Angelo Barberi

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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