The government's attack on public schools continues. The target, once again, is technical institutes, one of the most important segments of the entire school system, with the largest number of students and workers. They are also a strategic sector for technological training, and therefore attractive for career guidance and for interests linked to the manufacturing sector. ---- The Reform for Technical Institutes, included in Mission 4 of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) and approved by the Council of Ministers in 2022, under the Draghi government, when Bianchi was Minister of Education, envisages a close connection between education and the manufacturing sector. The plan was divided into two phases, the first of which was the pilot program for the 4+2 curriculum, which we have discussed on Umanità Nova on other occasions. This program, as its name suggests, is strictly dependent on market and business needs, with a complete cut of one school year, a portion of teaching hours given away to companies, and an exponential increase in hours of school-work training (formerly work-based learning). Two years after the pilot program was launched, the program has proven to be a flop: users have shown very little acceptance for this model; in the very few institutions that have experimented with it, the intensification associated with compressing five years into four has only led to a reduction in quality and increased selection for students, increased workloads, and a loss of staff for teaching and technical staff.
The second phase of the technician reform is now underway, affecting the entire sector. The implementing decree was published last March, which, as explicitly stated, aims to update curricula based on demand from the national production system. This is a veritable deconstruction of curricula and timetables, as well as of the subjects studied, which will be grouped by subject area.
Within the 11 curricula, there will be a defined area of national general education (language, mathematics, history-geography, law-economics, physical education, and the ever-present Catholic religion) and a defined flexible curricula (subject areas related to experimental sciences and subjects characterizing the curricula), including a "territorial" area reserved for companies based on partnership agreements with local businesses.
A disaster concocted in the dark, which is expected to begin next September 1st, with the 2026-27 school year. Until March, no one knew the details of the new structure: not even the families of future first-year students who enrolled their children in a school with a very different structure from the one that will begin in September; Nor are teachers, who in some cases are assigned subjects they've never taught, often sharing them with "teachers" from the business world, and who in all cases suffer significant cuts in teaching hours.
The changes introduced by this second and even more significant tranche of the reform are colossal. Until now, technical schools had a single two-year program, and the choice of major was made starting in the third grade: a minimal guarantee of a homogeneous basic cultural education and greater awareness in choosing a career path. Now, the single two-year program is no longer in place; the choice is made midway through the eighth grade, and career-related training begins immediately. Also noteworthy is the move forward in school-to-work training, which begins in the second grade instead of the third, with an overall increase in teaching hours.
The chaos the reform creates in subjects is devastating. Many subjects are losing hours, including Italian, Mathematics, Art in Tourism, Geography, and Foreign Languages. In the two-year program for the Environmental Technology area, a new subject called "Experimental Sciences" will be introduced, combining Chemistry, Physics, and Science, with a single teacher. This mix will result in a total loss of 231 hours per class over the two-year period, compared to what would have been possible if these subjects had remained independent. The Ministry has not yet determined who will teach the new subject "Experimental Sciences," which includes the other subjects. Some will be asked to teach subjects they don't know; atypical competitive classes will be created, combining multiple subjects, and school principals will manage staffing based on clientelism; there will be a decline in teaching quality and job losses, resulting in the insecurity of tenured teachers and unemployment for current temporary teachers. On the other hand, alongside the compressed subjects whose hours are being cannibalized, there is a certain amount of flexibility, an area in which hours can be allocated to the "local community," meaning local businesses and enterprises, which can conveniently enter the school, not for an extracurricular project, but by occupying curricular space. This fact prompts further reflection: beyond the completion of the long-underway corporatization process, the inclusion of courses linked to the specific entrepreneurial characteristics of a given area-given the marked differences in production patterns across the country-also represents a way of informally implementing, in schools, the differentiated autonomy so longed for by various governments and yet never formally achieved.
As if that weren't enough, this unfortunate overall restructuring of technical staff has been conducted with bungling and incompetence. There is a lack of guidelines, a lack of guidance on how to manage staffing, how to handle redundancies, and everything else. These are operations that, under normal circumstances, are carried out at this stage, within the first week of May, if the school year is to begin. Schools are complex machines, of which the ministry and government appear to be completely unaware. When asked for technical clarification, the response has been completely inconsistent and impossible to implement. Meager, in no way decisive, corrections have been announced, which would, however, require not only financial resources but also well-defined operational steps, of which there appears to be no clue at the ministerial and government levels. Obviously, the plan we are interested in is not the smooth technical functioning of a reform that should be thrown away, but we must nevertheless highlight the crass incompetence accompanying this operation to destroy a portion of public schools.
Many teaching staff have expressed opposition to the reform of the technicians, documents have been drafted, and union initiatives have been undertaken. The concertative unions quickly called off the unrest, saying they were reassured by the clumsy, ineffective, and objectively unenforceable fixes promised by Valditara. The CGIL, currently seen in a laughable "barricade" mode, as always happens when there's no friendly government, distanced itself from the others by demanding nothing less than a one-year postponement and the opening of a discussion. The grassroots unions active in the school sector are demanding the abolition of the technicians' reform. Unicobas included this important demand among the points of its strike platform on April 20th, organized assemblies, and held a sit-in outside the ministry.
It is important that the mobilization on this issue continues to grow and become more radical. No trust can be placed in the concertative unions, eternally subservient to the demands of employers and Confindustria. Nor can we place any trust in the CGIL's pronouncements, which announce short-term and unreliable battles, limiting itself to proposing a postponement that will prove ineffective. Moreover, the education ministers of "friendly" center-left governments have actively advanced the processes of corporatization and privatization of schools that have developed over time: from Carrozza under the Letta government, to Giannini under Renzi, to Fedeli under the Gentiloni government, or the aforementioned Bianchi, minister under Draghi. This is only referring to the recent period; if we then go back to the early 2000s, we recall that Minister Berlinguer already wanted to shorten the high school curriculum by a year and introduce a corporate-inspired merit assessment. In short, it's important to distinguish between those making credible protests and those playing at being the opposition of the moment. We must not forget, among other things, the interests that the CGIL also has in the management of the technical and vocational training programs activated by the Regions, in which the space reserved for businesses is extremely significant and which have long constituted an alternative to purely job-based training, competing with the technical and vocational education offered by public schools.
Against the reform of technicians, we need clear, timely, and radical opposition. It must be rejected, not postponed and refined. We support the mobilizations of grassroots unions, workers, teachers' associations, and students who are truly fighting against a process that will lead, in addition to all the disasters highlighted above for the sector, to an increase in the power of the employers, to increased exploitation, and to making the younger generations slaves of labor.
We forcefully oppose all this.
Patrizia Nesti
https://umanitanova.org/una-riforma-da-buttare-istituti-tecnici-sotto-attacco/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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