At the demonstration in Piazza Santi Apostoli in Rome, on May 30, there were not very many people, but the school strike went a little better than the previous ones. The participation of teachers and other staff was between 10 and 20 per cent, compared with a percentage between 3 and 7 in the mobilizations in recent years. To the sacrosanct historical reasons for protesting, starting with meager salaries, new ones are added, with an ever greater gap between the political proposals of the ministry of education and those of the trade unions.
The fact that Minister Patrizio Bianchi was not a professional politician and had worked in Emilia-Romagna in some important experiments had opened many hopes at the time of his appointment. After a little over a year they are almost all ignored, and the disappointment is turning into anger, also fueled by the fact that the NRRR appears more and more as a missed opportunity for a democratic reform of the school system.
On the one hand, the government tries to devise methods for recruiting and training teachers based on incentives, awards, selective evaluations; on the other hand, the trade unions try to protect the forms of national collective bargaining and the availability of training measures (for example the teacher’s card of 500 euros per year).
The result resembles a zero-sum game: neither the government nor the unions manage to gain credibility in the eyes of the teaching class and students. The reasons are simple: teachers are paid too little for the work they do, precarious work in a context that thrives on programming is detrimental to everyone, the professional level of teachers is very uneven.
What would then be needed? A little bit of truth. On the part of Minister Bianchi: the courage to move away from the policies of cuts and austerity that have been the norm in recent years; to say that “between 2031 and 2032 we will have more than a million fewer children, but smaller and smaller classes makes no sense”, because “children in too small classes do not meet” is nonsense. On the part of trade unions: more attention to pedagogical innovation; the defense of professionalism is never corporate. Faced with a government that seems to be looking for ways to distinguish between better-prepared and less-prepared teachers, the answer is to extend quality compulsory vocational training to all.