A-Infos (en) Italy, Umanita Nova: School is devalued because work has been devalued (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Working in schools, it's hard to escape the clear impression, only 
occasionally fully realized, of their decline. Common sense tends to 
attribute it to a loss of authority and a lack of leadership, and then, 
predictably enough, divides its blame for this decline: students, 
families, teachers, pedagogues, and reforms that have allegedly 
abandoned seriousness and selectiveness. ---- Perhaps it would be more 
interesting, instead of this playground dispute, to question the 
relationship between the decline of the educational institution and the 
emergence of a society in which the organizing principle of every aspect 
of life is increasingly constituted by the logic of the market, profit, 
competition, and financialization.

The question, then, can be reversed: why should a society recognize the 
authority of an institution from which it has progressively removed an 
autonomous cultural function?

What the productive system demands of schools today is not, first and 
foremost, the training of people with broad and detailed knowledge, but 
rather the production of adaptable, flexible workers, capable of solving 
problems and quickly adapting to changes in the workplace. People 
capable of finding answers, much less encouraged to ask 
questions-especially those that concern the meaning and overall 
organization of the reality in which they operate.

In this context, solid knowledge, whether disciplinary or otherwise, 
risks appearing not only useless, but even harmful. Knowledge, when it 
isn't limited to the possession of information or immediately usable 
skills, allows for a greater understanding of social phenomena and, with 
it, the ability to question and challenge the existing order.

It's not just what is taught that is being transformed. At the same 
time, the status of those involved in school is changing: teachers are 
increasingly becoming executors of procedures, and students are becoming 
clients of a training agency with increasingly limited horizons. Both 
are losing autonomy within a highly technological machine, in which 
procedures, protocols, certifications, indicators, and frameworks are 
taking center stage.

It is in this context that the issue of skills should also be addressed, 
which has become a classic target of teacher discontent.

The skills paradigm had also laboriously emerged from the attempt to 
overcome the dusty rubble of the liberal and Gentile school, founded on 
a precise hierarchy of knowledge and capable of functioning as a 
powerful device for social selection. The idea that knowledge also meant 
knowing how to independently use what one knew, connecting different 
types of knowledge and applying it to the understanding of real-world 
situations, possessed a disruptive force of its own.

The problem, then, is not that skills have replaced knowledge. The 
problem is what both skills and knowledge have been transformed into.

A paradigm built partly in an attempt to overcome a classist and 
exclusionary school model has been progressively bent to the 
construction of a school that follows protocols and compiles grids. 
Competence, from the ability to independently use knowledge to 
understand and act in reality, is reduced to the ability to provide a 
predicted and measurable performance. At the same time, knowledge is 
increasingly selected and valued based on its immediate applicability.

For this reason, making skills the enemy risks being a convenient 
shortcut. It means attributing to a pedagogical paradigm a 
transformation that actually has much deeper material roots. And above 
all, it risks pointing to a previous school system as an alternative, 
one that was certainly less corporatized, but also more selective, 
classist, and exclusionary.

The contrast between the school of knowledge and the school of skills 
thus ends up obscuring the problem rather than clarifying it. Knowledge 
can be a tool for emancipation, but it can also be the cultural capital 
through which a selective school reproduces social hierarchies. A skill 
can mean autonomy in the use of knowledge or simply the ability to 
effectively perform an assigned task.

The crucial question is another: what social function do we attribute to 
knowledge?

When knowledge is subordinated to the immediate needs of the production 
system, the construct of skills loses its ability to challenge the 
hierarchy of knowledge and expertise and becomes a device for adapting 
to the market. The result is a school that simultaneously loses what was 
best in its disciplinary tradition and what was emancipatory in its 
attempt to transcend it.

This is a situation that is difficult to redress from within the school 
system. The transformation of teachers into executors of procedures and 
students into clients of a training agency has deprived both of their 
importance and centrality, inserting them into a machine in which 
autonomy is progressively replaced by conformity to procedures.

For this reason, the demand for more complex and nuanced education 
cannot come solely from schools. It can only arise from a broader social 
need.

And this is where the problem inevitably becomes a trade union one.

The problem isn't just defending school workers. It's understanding what 
we need to defend them from. Because the same material condition-low 
wages, loss of autonomy, increasing bureaucracy, professional 
devaluation-can produce very different political interpretations.

The frustration of those who work in schools can translate into a demand 
for greater authority, regret for a more selective school system, 
intolerance toward students and families, and a rejection of skills, 
inclusion, or any pedagogical innovation identified with the 
institution's decline. It's an understandable reaction to the loss of 
control over one's work. But transforming this reaction into a union-led 
perspective would once again be mistaking the effects for the causes.

A union can claim the lost status of a profession or demand power for 
those who practice that profession. They are not the same thing.

In the first case, prestige, authority, social recognition, and, of 
course, higher wages will be sought. In the second, wages and economic 
recognition remain central, but alongside a reduction in bureaucratic 
subordination, educational freedom, the time required to complete one's 
work, staffing, the ability to collectively decide on the school's 
organization, and the rejection of its reduction to a mere training 
agency catering to the needs of the market.

As I have already written, teachers cannot consider transforming their 
role and, more prosaically, increasing their corporate income by 
alienating themselves from the society in which they work.

The material condition of teaching work is in fact inseparable from the 
value that a society places on education and, even further upstream, 
from the type of work that its production system requires.

An economic system that relies heavily on poor, flexible, vulnerable, 
and poorly self-sufficient workers has little interest in providing 
broad and complex education to the general public. This is not because a 
limited cultural heritage automatically leads to low wages-that would be 
too simple a relationship. Rather, it's because a work organization 
based on workers' contractual weaknesses requires above all 
adaptability, availability, and immediately deployable skills. It has 
much less need for cultural autonomy and the ability to critically 
question the organization in which one is embedded.

The causal relationship, then, should perhaps also be read in the 
opposite direction to the usual one. It's not just the devaluation of 
schools that leads to the devaluation of teachers' work. It's the 
general devaluation of work that produces a school inadequate to that 
work and, consequently, devalues those who work there.

The data help provide a tangible measure of the phenomenon. According to 
the OECD, in its member countries, the actual salaries of primary and 
secondary school teachers average between 83 and 91 percent of the 
income of workers with a similar level of education. In Italy, the gap 
is much more marked: in lower secondary school, for example, a teacher 
between the ages of 45 and 54 earns, on average, approximately 65 
percent of the income of a full-time worker with a similar level of 
education. And while since 2015, the actual salaries of primary school 
teachers have grown in real terms by an average of 14.6 percent in the 
OECD area, in Italy they have decreased by 4.4 percent.*

At this point, it should not be surprising that the choice to work in 
schools is supported above all by a passion for educational work or, 
more prosaically, by the lack of better alternatives.

But right here the issue ceases to be merely one of wages and, above 
all, ceases to be merely one of education.

If we want to restore economic and social value to the work of teachers, 
we must simultaneously reclaim the social value of what is produced 
through that work. The question is whether schools should produce human 
capital adaptable to the contingent needs of the market, or people 
capable of understanding the world they live in, asking questions, and 
acting collectively on reality.

For a grassroots union, this means, I believe, making a final decision: 
to be a union representing a profession that is asserting its status, or 
to be a labor union that operates in schools.

The fight for wages and working conditions in schools cannot therefore 
be separated from the fight for higher wages, greater autonomy, and 
greater bargaining power for the workforce as a whole. And the defense 
of knowledge cannot coincide with nostalgia for a selective school 
system that distributed that knowledge according to social class.

Perhaps this is precisely where we should start when discussing the 
decline of schools. Not simply asking how to restore authority to 
teachers or how to restore the school system of the past. The question 
is what kind of society might once again need an authoritative school 
system, one that is free, culturally ambitious, and capable of producing 
not only adaptable workers, but people capable of critically 
understanding the existing order and, when necessary, imagining a 
different one.

* Source: OECD, Education at a Glance 2025, data on teacher salaries and 
their relationship with the earnings of workers with tertiary education.

Stefano Capello
https://umanitanova.org/la-scuola-si-svaluta-perche-e-stato-svalutato-il-lavoro/
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