Patrizia Nesti's article ( "New teaching guidelines for the first cycle.
The old man who advances", Umanità Nova, year 105, number 2, 9 February2025, p. 2 ) concluded its analysis of Minister Valditara's statements
regarding the Ministerial Indications, which were still in progress at
the time: "Valditara's teaching guidelines 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 to
consolidate consensus aimed at right-wing voters who want to listen to a
vocabulary characterized by references to tradition, seriousness, and
the supposed roots of the West. In practice, school is instead pushed in
a completely different and equally deleterious direction (...). Teaching
by skills, the clear loss of hours dedicated to the cultural axis in
technical subjects but not only, the objective of four-yearly all high
schools, including lyceums, the spread of the corporate school that
imposes its own contents, methods and styles: all this, which is
unfortunately 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 anyway because they speak of identity,
of hegemony, of social exclusion, of suprematism, addressing a
reactionary world that adores this language, just as it adores, at the
same time, to lighten the school from any cultural “ballast” to make it
more functional to early job training, to the market, to exploitation.”
In the meantime, on March 11, 2025, the Ministry of Education and Merit
(MIM) finally made available the draft of the new text of the National
Guidelines for nursery school and the first cycle of education, which
will replace those currently in force, adopted in November 2012 and
updated in 2018 (National Guidelines and New Scenarios). Analyzing it,
we can first of all say that Patrizia Nesti was right: it is a document
that integrates the neoliberal logic of subjugation of the school to the
logic of the market with the statist and nationalist logic of the
radical right. The novelty, therefore, lies in this integration and we
must ask ourselves what its meaning is.
The document is very long, over one hundred and fifty pages, stuffed
with didactic jargon and incongruous flattery about the good intentions
of the editors who care about the centrality of the student, his
formation as an autonomous personality, etc. together with the
reiteration of the central points, of subservience to the dominant
logic, of the indications and of the past reforms. On the other hand,
the ideological flattery was also present in these: you can't say I'm
reforming the school to make it work worse from the point of view of the
cultural formation of the subjects and better from the point of view of
the master race... Some points of novelty appear, however:
schematically, the recovery of manual skills and cursive writing, the
promotion of reading aloud and poetic memorization, the return of Latin
in the lower secondary school, even if as an optional option, a new
perspective of the teaching of history that ideologically exalts the
"Western roots", the accentuation of the centrality of the teacher as
director of the educational path and the greater involvement of families
in the educational pact. [1]
Some of these are clearly an advertising call to the “good old days”:
how nice it was to teach how to write in beautiful handwriting, to know
Pascoli’s poems and Dante’s tercets by heart, to study Latin from an
early age… In practice, an outline of the imagery of the good right-wing
father who complains about the school ruined by ’68 who is tickled by
these aspects: finally someone who wants to bring “seriousness” and
discipline back into the school walls! But let’s say that these “good
practices” were actually wanted to reintroduce: the process of
degradation in the actual acquisition of content – but also of the
skills and competences on which so much emphasis is placed – that we
find in the latest generations thanks to the myriad of counter-reforms
and ministerial counter-indications, would increase disproportionately.
In fact, seen within a number of hours formally eroded with their direct
reduction via the Gelmini reform and materially with the hours of
alternation and other things, similar indications, if seriously
implemented, would worsen the situation, diverting even more the
attention and commitment of the students.
I will venture a prediction: these indications will remain a dead
letter, in the sense that teachers will have something else to think
about in order to train their students in the midst of all the
structural difficulties introduced by the State in these decades, other
than dedicating hours to beautiful handwriting and memorization of the
Supreme Poet. On the other hand, I believe that the Ministry imagines
this very well and, in fact, this part of the indications is pure
ideological marketing.
Instead, speeches such as the centrality of the teacher as "director" of
the educational path and the increase in the involvement of families in
the educational pact, are once again modulated in a way to exonerate the
State from the failures caused by its structural reforms: the fault lies
with the teacher who has not been able to be a "master", that is, to be
passionate about his or her own subject and/or with the school audience
of families who get in the way without effective skills in the
formulation of the general school dynamics of learning. In fact, I
hardly believe that the government has all this desire to defend
teachers from the interference of families, if anything it is looking
for another scapegoat for its failures.
However, what obviously caught the most attention was the explicit
ideological affirmation of the supremacy of Western civilization within
the guidelines for school teaching. Having a Eurocentric perspective has
always been a characteristic of Italian school programs but, this time,
addressing the issue, a ministry of education states that, in fact, this
perspective would be too little Eurocentric, to the point of not being
able to adequately develop a sense of national identity and internality
to the "Western" cultural tradition.
In my travels abroad, I have often found myself amazed at how,
generally, the people in the non-European places I visited had a much
greater knowledge of Western history than I had of theirs, thus making
me experience first-hand the ideological setting of my historical
education at school and university. Now, even the minimum amount of
information we have on the history of Asian, African, South American
peoples, etc. – especially that which apparently has nothing to do
directly with our “true” history – seems excessive and the intention,
not even too veiled, is to transform the rest of the world into inferior
races “à la Vecchioni” and “without history”.
In short, the meaning of these national indications is precisely that of
integrating a racist and colonialist mentality within a general
neoliberal perspective of subjugation of educational institutions to the
desires of political and economic power. A very dangerous perspective,
since it is perhaps no coincidence that it arises within a historical
moment in which the prospect of using the young, and differently young,
generations as cannon fodder in wars against "non-Westerners" is
increasingly present. They want to bring out of school obedient workers
with the minimum of indispensable culture but, apparently, also people
educated to the oppression of an "other" who, from the first moments of
learning, must be perceived as culturally inferior.
Another aspect of the matter is that, despite all the flattery about
“welcoming” and “integration,” this swill will also be served to the
younger generations of immigrants. To understand the meaning of this
last thing, I will make a historical parallel. In ancient Athens, the
mythical place where “Western culture” was formed, “free” married women
were practically confined to their homes: one of the few moments in
which they could go out was to attend the tragedies that represented
their inferior condition, such as the cycle of the Oresteia.
Agamemnon is married to Queen Clytemnestra and the two have a son,
Orestes, and a daughter, Iphigenia; Agamemnon, to please the gods, kills
his daughter by offering her as a sacrifice. Upon his return, to avenge
Iphigenia, Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon. Orestes, to avenge his father,
returns and kills his mother. Orestes takes refuge in the temple of
Apollo and asks to be judged. He is defended by Apollo and twelve
citizens are chosen as a jury; one half is for the guilt of Orestes and
the other for his innocence. Apollo then pronounces this speech: "The
mother is not the generator of what is called a son, but only makes grow
what has been sown by the father, in short, mothers do not exist. I will
show you the proof of what I say: Athena was born from a bump of Jupiter
and this proves that a father can exist even without a mother". In fact,
Athena herself intervenes to help Apollo and Orestes and says: "There is
no mother who has generated". [2]
As in the educational process reserved for Athenian women, a similar
approach would lead young students, children of migratory processes, to
internalize their inferiority, leaving them, in fact, as the only way
out, an “integration” into the racist and colonial culture that
oppresses them and the obligation to become obedient cannon fodder like
their native companions. In short, the alternative “socialism or
barbarism” seems more and more an interpretative key of our times, even
of a document from a ministry of education.
Henry Voccia
[1] There are other new points, for example the intervention on
fundamental disciplinary knowledge, the STEM approach and the
introduction of a discussion on Artificial Intelligence, but they are
linked to the technological innovations of the present and/or do not
make much sense for our discussion.
[2] AESCHYLUS, Oresteia, in AA. VV., Greek Tragic Plays, Milan,
Mondadori, 1977, pp. 133.
https://umanitanova.org/scuola-di-obbedienza-riflessioni-sulle-indicazioni-ministeriali/
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