The poverty of our century is different from the poverty of any othertime. It is not, as in the past, the result of natural scarcity, but ofa set of priorities imposed on the rest of the world by the rich. -----Nicoletta Dentico, Rich and good? ---- After a long experience in theTurin suburbs, last year I obtained a transfer to a middle school in mycity, Catania, in a neighborhood considered "at risk" (but not too much,in the sense that in the city there are well-established contextsworse). I well remember the amazement of many welcoming colleagues who,even today, continue to ask me why I left the North - whose schools, inthe collective imagination of southern teachers who escaped themigrations imposed by ministerial algorithms, appear clean, tidy andequipped with the most innovative, attended by educated students, with asolid cultural background and eager to learn - for a context considereddemeaning.In reality I don't think I suffered any culture shock and the impactwith the new school was not at all unsettling. From a structural pointof view, first of all, the building, like those in the Turinneighborhoods where I taught, appears squalid, dirty and dusty, freezingin winter and scorching in summer. Perpetually humid. Smashed windowsand shutters, broken doors or doors with faulty locks, peeling walls,inadequate heating, non-existent external lighting, frequent shortagesof toilet paper or soap, entire wings abandoned. Missing, if nothingelse, are those sinister gratings on the ground floor intended fordefense against night-time attacks by vandals which give the similarbuildings in the North a gloomy appearance of a place of detention.Common denominator: a general atmosphere of neglect, abandonment anddemobilization, against which the useless efforts of numericallyundersized and often poorly motivated school collaborators areshattered. The results of reporting the damage to the competentmunicipalities are similar between the North and the South. Punctuallyignored.And we come to the "human" aspect. Net of a preponderant presence in thenorthern suburbs of pupils of foreign origin alongside those of more orless remote southern origin, the social, cultural and economicbackground also appears similar: parents who are largely poorly literateand have a calibrated cultural background on television shows and socialmedia, with precarious and low-income jobs, sometimes with some criminalrecord, who treat their children as equals, raising them aboveeverything else, only to then delegate their educational function to thesmartphone and the PlayStation. Textbooks are often consideredsuperfluous - as is the entire educational aspect of school, consideredlike a baby-parking - and in many cases are not purchased, whilei-phones, designer clothes, expensive hairstyles, unlikely cosmeticinterventions and various fetishes of consumer society are alwaysexhibited with ease by influencers. Many students demonstrate cognitive,attention and memory deficits, behavioral disorders and dysfunctions ofvarious kinds. Difficulty in relating to the "other", aggression andquarrelsomeness, apathy and apathy, gambling addiction and addiction tovideo screens now represent the rule rather than the exception. There isalso a worrying increase in the case of students with an invertedcircadian rhythm: they sleep during the day - even at school - and spendthe night on digital devices. To be honest, there are significantexceptions of families who make many sacrifices for their children andwho still believe in the value of school and its role - once essential,now who knows - as a social lift. However, despite themselves, they haveto clash with a school system that advertises itself as "inclusive" foreveryone, but which in fact is "exclusive" precisely for those few whoreally want to learn.Teaching in the suburbs of big cities - both in the North and in theSouth - becomes more and more difficult every year. My response to mycolleagues, therefore, is always the same. In the general disaster ofsociety and, specifically, of the Italian school system, perpetratedindiscriminately by all the ministers of public education who havesucceeded one another from the Berlinguer Reform to today, with thecomplicity of the major trade unions, if we want to talk about classdialectics - and it is necessary to talk about it because the Italianschool today is classist as never before - it should be identified notso much in a phantom North-South opposition - as the questionableInvalsi statistics would like, among other things -, but in a dialecticwithin the cities themselves, between "centre" (or at most "residentialneighbourhoods") and "suburbs". Put in brutal terms: our countryguarantees quality education - of course, always according to thetechnocratic and developmentalist business model imposed by the EU andthe 2030 Agenda - in adequate and hospitable structures for the childrenof the rich or for the increasingly fewer children of the goodbourgeoisie, destined to replenish the fortunes of their families oforigin; all the others spend their days bivouacking, insulting andbeating each other in dangerous caves where the daily physical survival- of the pupil, the teacher and the school assistant - appears to beanything but a foregone conclusion. In short, the situation seemsdesperate and the social gap is growing ever wider. But here,fortunately, the infamous "external" projects intervene to providevaluable support in alleviating inequalities, evidently intolerable forthe high and magnanimous spheres of the new global governance...A few days after arriving at the new institute I learned that our schoolhad been chosen, together with one hundred other "lucky" Italianinstitutes located in "at risk" areas, for an experimental projectpromoted by one of the most important NGOs in at an international levelclose to the United Nations, in partnership with a research group closeto an equally renowned university in the North, aimed at combating"digital educational poverty". The reflections on this concept and onthe entire project deserve much more discussion. Here I would like to atleast underline on the one hand the senseless absurdity of anintervention regarding "digital educational poverty" in school contextsdeprived of everything, attended by pupils - pre-adolescents oftenwithout space-time coordinates and semi-illiterate - who ask for meaningof words such as "highway", "station" or "orchard" - only to then notlisten to the answer because they are distracted by other mental pop-ups- and in which overexposure to digital represents one of the mostevident causes of the disarming conditions of students; on the other,the slimy hypocrisy that lies behind the post-colonial plots of globalphilanthrocapitalism, which with its right hand creates a social,cultural and economic inequality never experienced in another era andwith its left distributes the rope to hang yourself as if it were alifeline.The usual myth of development and innovation at all costs, the panaceafor every social evil, reigns undisputed over everything. The dominantlogic, however, is always the same: change everything so that nothingchanges.Livio Marchesehttps://www.sicilialibertaria.it/_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten