Working in schools, it's hard to escape the clear impression, only occasionally fully realized, of their decline. Common sense tends to attribute it to a loss of authority and a lack of leadership, and then, predictably enough, divides its blame for this decline: students, families, teachers, pedagogues, and reforms that have allegedly abandoned seriousness and selectiveness. ---- Perhaps it would be more interesting, instead of this playground dispute, to question the relationship between the decline of the educational institution and the emergence of a society in which the organizing principle of every aspect of life is increasingly constituted by the logic of the market, profit, competition, and financialization.
The question, then, can be reversed: why should a society recognize the authority of an institution from which it has progressively removed an autonomous cultural function?
What the productive system demands of schools today is not, first and foremost, the training of people with broad and detailed knowledge, but rather the production of adaptable, flexible workers, capable of solving problems and quickly adapting to changes in the workplace. People capable of finding answers, much less encouraged to ask questions-especially those that concern the meaning and overall organization of the reality in which they operate.
In this context, solid knowledge, whether disciplinary or otherwise, risks appearing not only useless, but even harmful. Knowledge, when it isn't limited to the possession of information or immediately usable skills, allows for a greater understanding of social phenomena and, with it, the ability to question and challenge the existing order.
It's not just what is taught that is being transformed. At the same time, the status of those involved in school is changing: teachers are increasingly becoming executors of procedures, and students are becoming clients of a training agency with increasingly limited horizons. Both are losing autonomy within a highly technological machine, in which procedures, protocols, certifications, indicators, and frameworks are taking center stage.
It is in this context that the issue of skills should also be addressed, which has become a classic target of teacher discontent.
The skills paradigm had also laboriously emerged from the attempt to overcome the dusty rubble of the liberal and Gentile school, founded on a precise hierarchy of knowledge and capable of functioning as a powerful device for social selection. The idea that knowledge also meant knowing how to independently use what one knew, connecting different types of knowledge and applying it to the understanding of real-world situations, possessed a disruptive force of its own.
The problem, then, is not that skills have replaced knowledge. The problem is what both skills and knowledge have been transformed into.
A paradigm built partly in an attempt to overcome a classist and exclusionary school model has been progressively bent to the construction of a school that follows protocols and compiles grids. Competence, from the ability to independently use knowledge to understand and act in reality, is reduced to the ability to provide a predicted and measurable performance. At the same time, knowledge is increasingly selected and valued based on its immediate applicability.
For this reason, making skills the enemy risks being a convenient shortcut. It means attributing to a pedagogical paradigm a transformation that actually has much deeper material roots. And above all, it risks pointing to a previous school system as an alternative, one that was certainly less corporatized, but also more selective, classist, and exclusionary.
The contrast between the school of knowledge and the school of skills thus ends up obscuring the problem rather than clarifying it. Knowledge can be a tool for emancipation, but it can also be the cultural capital through which a selective school reproduces social hierarchies. A skill can mean autonomy in the use of knowledge or simply the ability to effectively perform an assigned task.
The crucial question is another: what social function do we attribute to knowledge?
When knowledge is subordinated to the immediate needs of the production system, the construct of skills loses its ability to challenge the hierarchy of knowledge and expertise and becomes a device for adapting to the market. The result is a school that simultaneously loses what was best in its disciplinary tradition and what was emancipatory in its attempt to transcend it.
This is a situation that is difficult to redress from within the school system. The transformation of teachers into executors of procedures and students into clients of a training agency has deprived both of their importance and centrality, inserting them into a machine in which autonomy is progressively replaced by conformity to procedures.
For this reason, the demand for more complex and nuanced education cannot come solely from schools. It can only arise from a broader social need.
And this is where the problem inevitably becomes a trade union one.
The problem isn't just defending school workers. It's understanding what we need to defend them from. Because the same material condition-low wages, loss of autonomy, increasing bureaucracy, professional devaluation-can produce very different political interpretations.
The frustration of those who work in schools can translate into a demand for greater authority, regret for a more selective school system, intolerance toward students and families, and a rejection of skills, inclusion, or any pedagogical innovation identified with the institution's decline. It's an understandable reaction to the loss of control over one's work. But transforming this reaction into a union-led perspective would once again be mistaking the effects for the causes.
A union can claim the lost status of a profession or demand power for those who practice that profession. They are not the same thing.
In the first case, prestige, authority, social recognition, and, of course, higher wages will be sought. In the second, wages and economic recognition remain central, but alongside a reduction in bureaucratic subordination, educational freedom, the time required to complete one's work, staffing, the ability to collectively decide on the school's organization, and the rejection of its reduction to a mere training agency catering to the needs of the market.
As I have already written, teachers cannot consider transforming their role and, more prosaically, increasing their corporate income by alienating themselves from the society in which they work.
The material condition of teaching work is in fact inseparable from the value that a society places on education and, even further upstream, from the type of work that its production system requires.
An economic system that relies heavily on poor, flexible, vulnerable, and poorly self-sufficient workers has little interest in providing broad and complex education to the general public. This is not because a limited cultural heritage automatically leads to low wages-that would be too simple a relationship. Rather, it's because a work organization based on workers' contractual weaknesses requires above all adaptability, availability, and immediately deployable skills. It has much less need for cultural autonomy and the ability to critically question the organization in which one is embedded.
The causal relationship, then, should perhaps also be read in the opposite direction to the usual one. It's not just the devaluation of schools that leads to the devaluation of teachers' work. It's the general devaluation of work that produces a school inadequate to that work and, consequently, devalues those who work there.
The data help provide a tangible measure of the phenomenon. According to the OECD, in its member countries, the actual salaries of primary and secondary school teachers average between 83 and 91 percent of the income of workers with a similar level of education. In Italy, the gap is much more marked: in lower secondary school, for example, a teacher between the ages of 45 and 54 earns, on average, approximately 65 percent of the income of a full-time worker with a similar level of education. And while since 2015, the actual salaries of primary school teachers have grown in real terms by an average of 14.6 percent in the OECD area, in Italy they have decreased by 4.4 percent.*
At this point, it should not be surprising that the choice to work in schools is supported above all by a passion for educational work or, more prosaically, by the lack of better alternatives.
But right here the issue ceases to be merely one of wages and, above all, ceases to be merely one of education.
If we want to restore economic and social value to the work of teachers, we must simultaneously reclaim the social value of what is produced through that work. The question is whether schools should produce human capital adaptable to the contingent needs of the market, or people capable of understanding the world they live in, asking questions, and acting collectively on reality.
For a grassroots union, this means, I believe, making a final decision: to be a union representing a profession that is asserting its status, or to be a labor union that operates in schools.
The fight for wages and working conditions in schools cannot therefore be separated from the fight for higher wages, greater autonomy, and greater bargaining power for the workforce as a whole. And the defense of knowledge cannot coincide with nostalgia for a selective school system that distributed that knowledge according to social class.
Perhaps this is precisely where we should start when discussing the decline of schools. Not simply asking how to restore authority to teachers or how to restore the school system of the past. The question is what kind of society might once again need an authoritative school system, one that is free, culturally ambitious, and capable of producing not only adaptable workers, but people capable of critically understanding the existing order and, when necessary, imagining a different one.
* Source: OECD, Education at a Glance 2025, data on teacher salaries and their relationship with the earnings of workers with tertiary education.
Stefano Capello
https://umanitanova.org/la-scuola-si-svaluta-perche-e-stato-svalutato-il-lavoro/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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