The proposals on the school are one of the weakest parts of the party programs. Before the elections, the political report put them in line, showing their vagueness and lack of economic coverage. Loredana Lipperini sull’Espresso has analyzed the paucity of the ideal horizon.
From the center-right came outlandish ideas such as the high school of Made in Italy or tired re-propositions of classic neoliberalism, such as aid to the private school system with a school voucher. From the center-left, attention to school has been expressed above all in the request for an increase in the time that students have to spend at school and in the remuneration of teachers. There have been extemporaneous statements such as those of Vittorio Sgarbi who proposed to enter school at 10, creating confusion on a very serious problem such as that of students’ sleep shortages and difficulties.
On the other hand, the massive, cruel, now thirty-year disinvestment in the school has produced a disaster. The media raise alarms: our children cannot read, they do not have the minimum skills to interpret an elementary text, more than half of the students are at risk of illiteracy. But pedagogical reflection continues to be lacking in the debate on schools.
In the formulas that are used there is an inability to analyze the problems that the school is facing. This is also not a recent issue. It can be traced back to the times of the constituent assembly and the republican genesis of the school. Next year will be the centenary of the Gentile reform, and the Italian education system is still largely based on the choices made in 1923.
The idea of a school inspired by Giovanni Gentile also took hold because there were no pedagogists and pedagogists in the constituent assembly; important intellectuals met in the school commission but knew very little about educational systems and pedagogy. The outcome was rather unfortunate: Aldo Moro managed to achieve a political goal of great conservation. On the crucial issues in the assembly there were four sides – Catholics, Marxists, liberal nationalists, secular socialists – and Catholics were able to create a double strategic alliance: with conservative liberals, ex monarchists, even ex fascists, they fought because the ‘Gentilian system remained unchanged, selective and authoritarian; with the Marxists they mediated so that forms of popular school were activated, for illiterate people and for disadvantaged people.
The result of this Christian Democrat strategy was that the demands of the most advanced laity and socialists were effectively marginalized or sidelined from the debate. Today, with the parties now reduced to fragile electoral teams, the debate on the school is hegemonized by visions that in many ways are heirs of that double alliance: classist on the one hand, compassionate on the other.
On the one hand there is the perspective expressed, sometimes without even political mediation, by Confindustria, which insists on a selective school, for investment in Stem subjects (scientific and technical), on the increase of higher technical institutes, more oriented at work, on the untouchability of school-work alternation. On the other hand, there is the idea that in the face of the increasingly evident shortcomings of the system, instead of intervening with public investments in the training of teachers, one can and must entrust the urgent need to buffer the most socially critical situations to the social private sector. , with special attention to peripheral or extra-urban areas. And to legitimize these two visions of response to the crisis, system analyzes are used that are functional to the remedy.
Let us take two expressions increasingly used in the debate on schools: implicit dispersion and educational poverty. The term implicit dispersion has become in common use during the pandemic, in particular in the discussion on the Invalsi tests: it would indicate that share of students who finish school without having acquired the fundamental skills in any of the three subjects monitored by the Invalsi (Italian, mathematics is English). The ideologues of the Brothers of Italy school, Luca Ricolfi and Paola Mastrocola, focus on the implicit dispersion in their latest book The scholastic damage, in which they strongly insist that the school selects little, sending students without the cultural resources to face the university with a reasonable probability of success. Their idea is that the progressive school – meaning the tradition of democratic education – has lowered the level of evaluation and therefore of preparation.
But Save the children also spoke of implicit school dropout last May, with an alarm launched on the occasion of the opening of Impossible 2022, a conference on education issues: “Implicit school dropout, that is, the inability of a child to 15 years of understanding the meaning of a written text is 51 percent. A tragedy, not only for the education system and for economic development, but for the democratic stability of a country. The most affected are students from the poorest families, those living in the south and those with a migratory background ”.
In reality, as I wrote with Cristiano Corsini a few months ago, the very concept of implicit dispersion is vague: detached from an accurate and contextualized social investigation. The notion of inapparent dispersion used by the pedagogist Benedetto Vertecchi in a 2012 essay guides us more clearly on how to intervene to improve the educational system: investing in active teaching and dealing with the social contexts in which schools are located. The PNRR allocates one and a half billion euros to counter the implicit dispersion, but does not indicate how this money should be invested by schools, precisely because perhaps the notion itself is confused. The risk is that of excessively mixing welfare interventions with educational ones.
The contrast between educational poverty and educational wealth does not help us to read inequalities and crises
Even the term educational poverty has now established itself in many official documents of the ministry of education, and recurs in public and political debate. The expression appeared in Italy for the first time in 2014, in a Save the children report entitled Aladdin’s lamp: “By educational poverty we mean the deprivation of opportunities for children and adolescents to learn, experience, grow and freely develop skills, talents and aspirations. For a child, educational poverty means being excluded from acquiring those skills necessary to live in a world characterized by the knowledge economy, speed and innovation. At the same time, educational poverty also means limited opportunities for emotional and relational development, for interpersonal relationships and for self-discovery and the world ”.
It is a multidimensional concept, which relates economic deprivation and school and educational shortages. The idea was born in an English-speaking environment and is linked to the economic theory of human capital: education is considered an investment that increases “the stock of skills and productive knowledge embodied in people”. A dollar invested in education corresponds to the number of dollars that investment brings to society as a whole.
An extension, or rather an elaboration, of the theory of human capital is represented by the theory of signaling. With this perspective we have a complementary explanation of why the more educated workers receive higher wages and the less educated lower wages. According to this theory, education has a signal function: employers use educational qualifications, the “signals”, rather than testing skills, to predict the productivity of individuals. The objective of educational policies must therefore be to make the most of not only skills, but the ability to make these skills visible.
For both theories, education is at the center of development and the fight against poverty: going to school increases the GDP of a country, to simplify. Within this theoretical framework, the concept of educational poverty was born precisely to try to keep the economic and educational dimensions together by introducing yet another dimension: the social one. The conceptual sphere of education and that of the social obviously have many common and intertwined areas, but if we tend to make them coincide, the risk is to water down and distort some important interpretative and intervention perspectives. The concept of educational poverty, for example, becomes measurable: we speak for example of human capital, cultural capital, and therefore, conversely, we speak of a lack of capital.
But the contrast between educational poverty and educational wealth does not help us to read inequalities and crises or to intervene adequately. It limits itself to applying an economic category first to the social sphere and then to the educational one, with the risk of bending or simplifying some aspects.
Article 3 of the constitution speaks of the removal of obstacles, evokes a horizon of substantial equality, which contains within itself a transformation of values, not just social compensation. If we interpret the crisis of the school system or of important parts of the school system as a primarily social crisis, the treatment will also be of a social nature. The history of the democratic school, on the other hand, calls us to its very opposite, that is, to make every intervention an intervention even with a high pedagogical profile.