The new National Guidelines for High Schools promoted by Minister Giuseppe Valditara are presented as a return to the "centrality of culture," to national identity, and to the strengthening of fundamental skills. But behind this rhetoric lies a much deeper political agenda: to restrict the scope for educational autonomy, centralize control over teaching content, and progressively transform schools into places of cultural conformity. ---- The crucial point is precisely this: academic freedom is not a corporate detail reserved for teachers. It is a constitutional principle that protects cultural pluralism and prevents the state from imposing an official truth. When a government seeks to define educational content, approaches, and objectives in an increasingly prescriptive manner, it is not simply "reforming curricula" (national guidelines): it is redefining the relationship between school, power, and democracy.
Article 33 of the Constitution states that "art and science are free, and their teaching is free." This does not mean educational anarchy or the absence of common curricula. However, it does mean that teachers cannot be reduced to mere enforcers of a cultural line established by the ministry in question. The function of public schools is not to instill ideological obedience, but to cultivate critical thinking.
The National Guidelines proposed by the Ministry, however, seem to go in the opposite direction. They reinforce an identitarian and nationalist vision of culture, insist on a celebratory narrative of Western tradition, and reduce the space for critical, interdisciplinary, and social approaches. Knowledge is presented as something neutral and immobile, while every real educational process arises from comparison, conflicting interpretations, and historical complexity.
The risk is especially evident in the humanities. History tends to be transformed into a narrative of national identity; philosophy into a canonical succession devoid of social and political conflict; literature into a repertoire of shared values to be transmitted rather than critically discussed. In this way, school loses its emancipatory function and increasingly approaches a pedagogy of adaptation.
And it is precisely in the selection of authors and cultural references that the ideological nature of the operation emerges most clearly. A school that exclusively emphasizes "Western civilization," interpreted in a celebratory manner, inevitably ends up marginalizing or undermining all those intellectual traditions that have criticized power, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism, and authoritarianism.
The real risk is a progressive reduction in the space dedicated to authors such as Antonio Gramsci, central to understanding the relationship between culture and hegemony; Karl Marx, fundamental to understanding social transformations and class conflict; Mikhail Bakunin and Errico Malatesta, almost always marginalized in syllabi despite their role in the history of European political thought.
The same goes for figures like Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose radical critique of consumerist conformity and power remains inconvenient; or Franco Basaglia and Don Lorenzo Milani, who questioned disciplinary institutions and the class-based nature of school.
Even feminist thought risks being relegated to the margins. Authors like Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, or Silvia Federici rarely find space within a traditionalist vision of culture based on the patriarchal and national canon.
Similarly, postcolonial studies and non-European literatures risk being undermined: Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire in fact call into question a Eurocentric and self-celebratory narrative of the West.
Even authors who are now central to the debate on contemporary society, such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Zygmunt Bauman, risk being treated marginally precisely because they help us understand the mechanisms of power, the reproduction of inequalities, and the transformations of contemporary capitalism.
Of course, no school curriculum can encompass everything. Every educational choice involves selection. But here the problem isn't quantitative: it's political. When authors who serve an identity-building narrative are privileged and those who foster critical and confrontational thinking are underserved, school ceases to be a place of pluralism and becomes a tool for cultural direction.
The attack on academic freedom, therefore, does not occur solely through official content, but through the construction of a cultural climate in which some perspectives are considered legitimate and others implicitly delegitimized or rendered invisible.
But ideological control is also accompanied by the growing bureaucratization of teaching. In recent years, frameworks, standards, platforms, monitoring, skills certification, and rigidly defined curricula have proliferated. Teachers are progressively transformed into compilers of procedures, while the scope for independent planning and pedagogical research is shrinking.
Within this framework, the new Guidelines risk representing a further leap in quality: a school increasingly focused on culturally "correct" content according to the government and simultaneously increasingly subordinated to the demands of the market and administrative governance.
There is also a precedent that should give pause: the new guidelines for civic education introduced in recent years. They too spoke of "strengthening common values" and "restoring the centrality of civic education." The result, however, has been largely disappointing. Civic education has often been transformed into a moralistic and rhetorical subject, dominated by abstract concepts of legality, homeland, respect for institutions, and proper behavior, rather than becoming a genuine space for critical analysis of social, economic, and political relations. Fundamental issues such as social conflict, inequality, colonialism, the role of labor, feminist, and environmental movements, and the mechanisms of economic and media power have frequently been marginalized or addressed superficially. In many cases, civic education has been used ideologically as a tool for cultural discipline rather than critical emancipation. It is difficult not to see the new Guidelines for High Schools as a continuation of that same approach.
On the one hand, there are calls for a return to cultural order; on the other, there is a push toward corporatization, competition, and the adaptation of schools to production demands. In both cases, however, the result is the same: reducing the critical autonomy of public schools, muzzling teachers, and repressing student dissent.
For this reason, the answer cannot be limited to a nostalgic defense of old curricula. The issue is political and democratic. Defending academic freedom means defending the very possibility of a school capable of fostering critical thinking, dissent, and intellectual autonomy.
A democratic society doesn't need teachers trained in cultural obedience. It needs teachers free to question the present, question history, challenge dominant narratives, and build knowledge together with students.
When political power attempts to transform schools into a tool for ideological direction, it's not just teachers' freedom that's undermined. It's the democratic quality of society as a whole.
http://www.alternativalibertaria.org
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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