WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, FAI, Umanitanova #2-25: The old man who advances. New teaching guidelines for the first cycle (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The news of the teaching guidelines for the first cycle of education

that Valditara would like to adopt starting from the next school year
has recently caused discussion. There is no official or even unofficial
text yet, but the minister has taken care to use all information
channels to spread the general content, which unmistakably stinks of
reactionary, nationalist, identitarian, exclusionary, if only because of
the fascist horizon in which these orientations are framed. ----
Optional Latin in middle schools is something that was already seen
between 1963 and 1977. The single middle school, established in 1962,
put an end to the distinction, after elementary school, between
gymnasium and vocational training. In a historical moment of strong
social impulse, of progressive debate, of struggles that led to mass
schooling, studying Latin in the single middle school, even at an
optional level, could be a way to access high school. Today,
reintroducing Latin in middle school has a very different meaning.
Social exclusion is the characteristic of the current political phase.
In school, the gap between high schools and professional technical
institutes is increasingly massive. Technical education is cannibalized
by companies, the supply chain not only reduces a year of school, but
erodes learning in favor of training, study in favor of early work,
teaching hours in favor of hours directly entrusted to companies, to
school-work alternation and apprenticeship. The girls and boys who
enroll in these schools, so openly and fiercely disconnected from the
cultural axis, will certainly not choose to take Latin in middle school.
It is clear that class divisions certainly do not pass only through
Latin, but there will be one more reason to experience them first-hand,
at thirteen, during a school morning.

And in any case, the Latin that Valditara wants to reintroduce is
certainly not the one that is linked to reflection on the language and
the curiosity of lexical discoveries. Nor is the minister credible when
he speaks of Latin as a gymnasium of logic. Valditara's Latin is the
language of "Romanity", of the conquerors of the world, of those who
went around making deserts calling them peace: once again
identitarianism, nationalism and ignorant disavowal of the multiple
linguistic interferences that are historically created, especially in
territories that have been crossed by different transits and
dominations, and that in any case have inherited more sermo vulgaris
than doctus from Latin.

Valditara then announced that he will get rid of geohistory to valorize
history. It's a shame that in primary and middle school, to which the
new guidelines are dedicated, geohistory does not exist: history and
geography are separate subjects and obviously it is up to the teacher to
make the appropriate interdisciplinary connections. Geohistory does
exist, but in the first two years of high school, which however is a
grade not covered by the new guidelines. It was Gelmini who introduced
it in 2010 as part of a reform that made colossal cuts aimed at saving
on staff: from three hours of history and two of geography, we went to
three hours of "history and geography", a single subject with a single
grade. It was a collapse of hours and a didactic confusion that only the
actual work in class, based, for those who want and know how to use
them, on margins of freedom of teaching and learning, was able to
partially correct, also finding points of interdisciplinary and
multicultural interest that were certainly not in Gelmini's forecasts.

The history that Valditara wants to enhance by purifying it from
geography is always that of the pompous and celebratory vision,
overflowing with nationalism and the cult of Western roots, which
characterizes his political vision and that of his government. A history
that would like to bury any critical and scientific methodological
system - in practice all modern historiography - defined as "ideology",
to become an exclusive narrative. Perhaps without even realizing it,
given his intellectual poverty, the minister goes back a lot, goes back
to the logography before Herodotus, when narrative invention prevailed
over sources, goes back to Livy, who did not differentiate (consciously,
knowing he would find more appreciation!) between facts and narration
derived from myths. He goes back to before Lorenzo Valla, the one who
demonstrated, thanks to philological comparison, therefore with a
scientific method, that the Donation of Constantine at the basis of the
temporal power of the popes was a sensational fake, an arbitrary
"narration".

According to Valditara, history must be the narration of national
history, according to a Eurocentric vision.  An obvious distortion, a
vision outside of time and space that does not consider what current
society is, but also a major limitation that the history of current
school programs already has. In short, Valditara, while putting his own
unbearable spin on it, spits on the wet. The history of our school books
is already Eurocentric and based on a Western approach. The history of
the Mediterranean basin and the Middle East (because it goes that far,
no further) is limited to antiquity; then those who had given birth to
writing, agriculture, the wheel, metallurgy suddenly become barbarians,
when the Greeks and Romans arrive. They are no longer spoken of and in
the vision of students their history stops at the image of a few
thousand years ago, the Egyptians are perpetually imagined in profile,
it is difficult to represent them "like us"; there is a sort of
infantilization of these peoples, stuck in an archaic phase without
evolution. Discriminatory and racist vision? Of course, you can't study
everything, not to mention that history is constantly getting longer and
that you should go not only far in space, but also far in time. In the
meantime, you can't go far, and that's already the case, even without
Valditara's dictates. And this shouldn't be forgotten when you denounce
the interventions of the minister on duty simply by defending the school
that exists, without giving yourself prospects for concrete and radical
change.

There are still many things to say about the teaching lines that
Valditara wants to introduce.

The minister urges the study of the epic, referring not only to the
classical one but also to the Nordic sagas, and urges the reading of the
Bible. Aside from the fact that the classical epic is already part of
the school programs, it is obvious that reading the Bible has the clear
purpose of exhibiting a religious hegemony on an ethnic basis in a
school that, especially in middle school, is necessarily increasingly
multi-ethnic and multicultural. In the exhortation to study the Nordic
sagas, it is impossible not to recognize Valditara's nostalgia for the
golden years of his party. How can we not remember the Lega of the early
days, the one that, in the desire to represent itself as a local
homeland bearer of Western values, built an identity based on the
naturalness of river mythology, the sun of the Alps, the rites of the
Po, blending Celtic, medieval and Christian references into a grotesque
mess?

And then the inevitable reference to the Italian language. Written
elaboration, beautiful writing, and reading are suddenly perceived as
elements of fragility in a school where for twenty years these
activities have been destroyed through Invalsi tests, hyper-structured
and standardized tests, multiple choice questionnaires, an exclusively
functional approach to the text, of which only the data necessary to
answer questions defined according to a precise command are to be
identified. It does not seem to us that Valditara, despite the mannered
complaints about the linguistic loss of the students, deviates from this
trend.

In short, Valditara's teaching instructions are on the one hand the
stupid re-proposal of what is often already in school programs and which
the minister is evidently unaware of; on the other hand they represent a
wink to traditional teaching, a completely political operation of
consolidation of consensus aimed at the right-wing electorate that wants
to listen to a lexicon characterized by references to tradition,
seriousness, the alleged roots of the West.

In practice, the school is instead pushed in a completely different and
equally deleterious direction, as we have already mentioned. Teaching by
skills, the clear loss of hours dedicated to the cultural axis in
technical schools but not only, the objective of making all secondary
schools four-year, including lyceums, the spread of the corporate school
that imposes its own contents, methods and styles: all this, which
unfortunately is an everyday reality, has very little to do with the
empty proclamations of a return to tradition trumpeted by Valditara.
Proclamations that are not empty because they speak of identity,
hegemony, social exclusion, suprematism, addressing a reactionary world
that adores this language, just as it adores, at the same time,
lightening the school from any cultural "ballast" to make it more
functional to early job training, to the market, to exploitation. It is
up to us not to underestimate this only apparent schizophrenia, to grasp
its meaning and scope, to oppose these policies both in school and in
the more general social context, with all the means at our disposal,
starting from our places of study and work.

Patrizia Nesti

image: Patrick Guenette

https://umanitanova.org/il-vecchio-che-avanza-nuove-linee-didattiche-per-il-primo-ciclo/
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