Just over a month ago I happened to attend a meeting held by the localsection of the Lions club entitled "From the culture of rights to theculture of duties" in the school where I teach - a professionalinstitute. The main speaker, who seemed to manifest, albeit confusedly,an organic vision of the State, the incarnation of that Leviathancapable of dominating primordial instincts, attempted to convince anaudience made up of boys and girls between the ages of seventeen andeighteen of the importance of taking on duties constitutionallyprescribed, the true glue of a community, rather than claiming rights ofall kinds which now only create confusion and disintegration. Naturallyhe didn't succeed and some girls and boys openly contested it, observinghow young people find themselves living in increasingly precariousconditions, therefore what rights and what duties did we want to talkabout if not even the most basic needs are possible today satisfy. Amongthe revealing moments of the meeting were those in which the speakeraddressed the audience directly in these terms: "you who will be thefuture ruling class". Now a similar statement, aimed at young people whoat most aspire to become owners of an artisan workshop, a bar, atrattoria, a restaurant, or in most cases are content with findingmanual employment, or entering the law enforcement agencies, can only bethe 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 beferociously classist. And it has never stopped being so, despite thatschool for all that seemed likely to be achieved at the end of theseventies of the last century. But even more, today's Italian schoolappears first and foremost to be a "regime" school, whose main task isto train the new generations in the "democratic" creed, of anincreasingly faded democracy, just as any regime trains own values, orrather 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 continuoushaemorrhage of rights. If it is true that all the statistics confirm thefact that if you come from an economically and culturally disadvantagedfamily - to adopt bureaucratic language - your destiny is largelysealed, it is in the living body of society that the class dimensionemerges throughout its evidence. In thirty years of teaching intechnical and professional institutes I have only rarely had to dealwith students whose parents were graduates and I would say none whoseparents belonged to the phantom ruling class, even if of low local rank.It certainly happens that among high school students there are childrenof the proletariat, but this is precisely an exception. The boys andgirls who arrive at professional institutes instead seem to be theresult of an educational path marked from the early years bydifficulties, lack of tools and stimuli, condescension, flattening. TheItalian school is structured to produce similar results. Even if inrecent decades the prejudices of the old-fashioned school have beenreplaced by a falsely open and "inclusive" pedagogism - the game school,the attractive school - which rather than breaking social patterns andconsolidated structures, confirms and strengthens them. I'm certainlynot arguing that the school of notions and failures was better, butassuming "libertarian" principles in a bureaucratized and authoritarianstructure is just hypocrisy. After all, no one, among governments orinstitutional parties, wants a school that truly transmits autonomy ofthought and critical skills, indeed the school of recent years, of thevarious Gelmini, Renzi, etc. reforms, has increasingly been structuredas a training school in a broad sense: obsequious citizens of abstractvalues and operators more or less functional to the production system.Whether all this is ultimately an ideological cover, in fact you want toprovide soft or hard skills for a mobile job market mainly interested inlow-cost labour, doesn't matter.Some general lines are being traced here, which should be explored ingreater depth, but the direction of today's school is clear and youngpeople from professional institutes represent it with "consistency":absolute devaluation of general/cultural knowledge, greater appreciationof specialist knowledge, acquisition of the elusive skills to use in theworld of work. Net of a disenchantment towards the future whose onlyaspiration is represented by the "permanent position" in the policeforce. Probably all this is more true from a southern perspective, butsocial hierarchies are well defined everywhere and the division betweenelite and mass is very rigid, in spite of all the constitutions in theworld and any empty principle of equality and freedom.The classist direction of the school is about to be accelerated by theintroduction of a new reform of the technical and professionalinstitutes, foreseen by the Pnrr, and by the launch of the so-calledorientation teaching. There is no space here to examine the governmentreform bill in detail, but to give a sense of the function that we wantto attribute to technical and professional schools, for which amongother things four-year and the simultaneous creation of new hightraining institutes lasting two years, just read this statement byMinister Valditara, reported by the Orizzonte scuola website, "It is areform that offers extraordinary opportunities to our young people,allowing many more job opportunities, and with faster entry times. Itserves to qualify them in line with the needs of the business world. Andthis also means increasing the competitiveness of businesses."The other piece of this economic vision of the school is represented bythe orientation guidelines, adopted with Ministerial Decree 22 December2022 n. 38, and ministerial circular no. 2790 of 11 October 2023. Thetwo provisions, issued to carry out the "orientation reform", should inthe intentions of the ministry revolutionize the way of teaching, forwhich the sole objective becomes to train students for inclusion in theworld of work; a school therefore conceived as a system that must createa reliable and guaranteed product to be supplied to businesses. Aboveall, willing to accept any working conditions and not to demand too manyrights.If it's not this classy school! Whose task is it to subvert such anunderstanding?Angelo Barberihttps://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
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