On April 22, the Minister of Education and Merit published a draft of the new National Guidelines for High Schools, prompting numerous responses from the high school education community, the vast majority of which were critical. With this in mind, after a careful reading of these guidelines, we attempt to analyze them, focusing on the typical high school subjects, combined in the department of Philosophy and History. ---- A warning for those less familiar with the mechanisms of writing government reforms: the statements of principle contained in the Preamble are largely acceptable, as were those of Renzi's Buona Scuola, as were and are those of all the preambles to every regulation that has worsened and worsens our lives. The logical fallacy is that of the inconsistency between means and ends, so often cited by Malatesta: objectives are declared to be shareable and positive, but means are proposed that make them impossible to achieve, or even sabotage them. Of course, amid so much that is shareable, there is always something that raises eyebrows: the ideology of merit and the primacy of skills, the apologia for the school-to-work process, some platitudes and unfounded claims about Artificial Intelligence, but the more interesting issues lie elsewhere.
First, let's clarify one point: based not only on various specific regulations but even on institutional provisions, ministerial guidelines can only be "indications" that are not binding on the specific curriculum of individual teachers. That said, ministerial guidelines have a dual value: first, they express an ideological orientation that, thanks to the communicative power of the broadcaster, is disseminated as a sort of manifesto; second, being a teacher does not automatically mean being aware of one's constitutional rights, and therefore, for some, these guidelines are perceived as binding ("Didn't they recommend Spinoza? Then I can't do it..."), and the associated ideological agenda is sometimes disseminated even by those who don't identify with them.
Let's analyze the proposals made for the traditional high school subjects: Philosophy and History. A general superficiality is immediately apparent: the premises, learning objectives, and knowledge are exactly the same for Classical, Scientific, Applied Sciences, Humanities, and Linguistics High Schools, despite the different subjects characterizing the various majors with which Philosophy and History are supposed to interact. I believe they made them generically and then copied and pasted them: if I were the minister, I would have given them only 20% of the agreed-upon salary. And it's not that it was a huge intellectual effort: it's intuitive, for anyone with even a passing knowledge of the subjects, that, for example, in an Applied Sciences High School, characterized by the engineering application of science and computer science, Philosophy, to best interact with such a major, should emphasize the logical aspect of its teaching, and History should emphasize the history of material life. But so it is, they didn't even try; However, apart from an intellectual superficiality, the thing could have an "ideological" sense, especially with regards to History.
Let's start with Philosophy. Here too, the premises are the standard ones we've long been accustomed to, perhaps with a slight emphasis on direct reading of the texts and the recommendation to address the thought of female philosophers. We've said that, in this type of guidance, the ideological aspect prevails: presences and absences, formulated by a political body, indicate the ideological preferences of the authors. What is clearly noticeable is a re-enactment of the Croce/Gentilian, liberal/fascist framework of philosophy-the perfect ideological synthesis of the current government.
A brief review: for Croce, philosophy is history because the Spirit can only be understood in its historical development; for Gentile, philosophy is action, and the history of philosophy is what contemporary thought recreates in its very making. In short, in both the liberal and fascist traditions, the history of philosophy is central to its study: it is no coincidence that in Italy, almost unique in the world, the study of its history rather than philosophy prevailed under fascism, and, after its fall, liberal-leaning governments reaffirmed this principle.
In recent decades, the historicist framework for the study of philosophy has often been questioned, especially through the idea of teaching by themes and/or a return to a purely theoretical, pre-Gentilian approach (logic, ethics, ontology). From the 1960s to the present, the debate has been cyclical, unresolved, and today a hybrid prevails: history + themes + argumentation, without a unified model. The national guidelines thus appear to be a restoration of the Crocean/Gentilian model, or even more than the Gentile one: the guidelines' invitations to direct reading of texts are present in the Gentile Reform-the study of philosophy in the "history of philosophy manual" originated with the Crocean framework, especially in the post-war period. The vague references to analytic philosophy and formal logic are then explained as a necessary homage to the philosophy most practiced in the Anglo-Saxon world-if the work had begun now, in the relatively cool climate with the current US administration, perhaps it wouldn't even exist.
A look at the absences. The absences of Spinoza and Marx have been noted, and there's no point in explaining their ideological significance; I think it's more useful to explain the meaning of Kant's semi-repression, reduced solely to the meaning of the concept of "critique" and not to the content of the "Critiques." Indeed, the Critique of Practical Reason is the most radical point of Enlightenment moral thought: the only moral actions are those that have the form of universality-they must apply to every human being-and reciprocity-they must be considered as such whether they are performed or received. Civil laws, whatever they may be, from whatever source they come, that lack these characteristics are not moral and do not deserve respect.
Let's now turn to History: here things are even more peculiar. We encounter once again (it's not the first time this ministry has insisted on it) the primacy to be given to European/Western history. "It seems certain, for example, that the invention of the compass and gunpowder must be attributed to Chinese civilization: but who can doubt that it was their use by a civilization with a power, a religion, and a worldview entirely different from those of the Celestial Empire? Who can doubt that it was this use, not that invention, that changed the world?" Of course, we're talking about "diversity" and not "superiority": but we know how, in the culture of the new right, the concept of diversity is the crowbar with which to recover the worst of the past. In any case, the content indications are almost entirely missing from the rest of the planet; even Islam, geographical discoveries/conquests, colonialism, and imperialism are minimized.
Phenomenal, however, is a "didactic" justification for Western-centrism: no one could doubt the "(...) substantial impossibility of studying with even a minimal amount of depth the historical events of such a diverse group of peoples and civilizations on Earth. Teaching adolescents something even slightly significant (...) about the Japanese Empire and at the same time the kingdom of Dahomey, the Inca Empire in South America and at the same time the Islamic India of the Mughals, can only appear to be a desperate undertaking."
"Impossibility," "a desperate undertaking." To define the study of world history in this way in the National Guidelines is not a scientific assessment, but a symptom of a cultural approach that is, to put it mildly, very backward. These words betray the assumption that history can only be made locally, and that every place on Earth should limit itself to its own history and traditions-this too is a byproduct of the culture of the new right.
But this is simply not true. World history is a consolidated teaching practice in American, Australian, Canadian, Korean, Singaporean, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian schools: to say it's impossible is to ignore decades of research and teaching experience. Ministerial consultants must be aware of these facts: however, they are blinded by an ideological assumption, and I'm paying them a compliment.
Finally, according to ministerial guidelines, "it has long been customary to show a certain sufficiency for so-called political history, arguing that the study of the 'material' history of economics, technology, and nutrition should be preferred (...). However, in keeping with a well-established tradition, the national guidelines also firmly maintain, for high schools, the choice of indicating political history as the main path to approaching the study of the past." Consequently, in the guidelines, the learning objectives and expected skills are all geared not only to Western history, but only to political history.
Let's leave aside the term "tradition," which once again harks back to right-wing culture, and return to the copy-and-paste process that forces all high school curricula into a Procrustean bed: what sense does it make to reduce the "material history of economics, technology, and nutrition" to a bare minimum in a high school specializing in the humanities, applied sciences, etc.? Or, to return to the discussion of world history, to exclude this approach altogether from a high school specializing in languages?
In reality, the discourse here too is ideological: political history, "the internal organization of human communities, the ways of understanding the individual and the family, the use and characteristics of property and territorial settlement, the modes of power, its organs and responsibilities, the characteristics of relationships with other communities, and the specific ideal and symbolic apparatus that animates them," is, in fact, the history of the powerful. The history of the economy and material life, on the other hand, sheds light on the lives of ordinary people-but evidently, unlike the powerful, we are not worthy of history.
Enrico Voccia
https://umanitanova.org/quando-i-fascisti-fanno-i-filosofi-indicazioni-nazionali-per-i-licei-pressappochismo-e-ideologia/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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