After the chorus of criticisms, three days later, Minister Giuseppe Valditara apologizes for the statements made in Milan. On 21 November, the Lega’s Minister of Education and Merit took part in an event in Milan called “Italy, heading north” promoted by the Amici delle Stelline association and the research institute Osservatorio Metropolitano of Milan. Valditara spoke above all of the episodes of violence that take place in the classroom and of his solutions: among other things, he proposed the introduction of socially useful jobs and an “educational” method based on humiliation.
“At the moment I used a certainly inadequate term, I confirm the message: learn the humility of apologizing – explains the minister -. In the video of the North Direction conference in Milan, I used a term that does not explain the meaning of my reasoning at all. I was speaking on an objectively intolerable episode, that of a student who punched a teacher. I said that suspending that boy for a year doesn’t make much sense, much better making him responsible by making him carry out socially useful work for the school community”.
Valditara went on to say: «In these cases I was and remain fully convinced that realizing one’s mistake, learning the humility to apologize, facing the sense of limitation and responsibility for one’s actions is a step full of educational and cultural significance. Admitting your mistakes means realizing that reality is bigger than your ego. It is an issue whose urgency I feel so urgently, as a person rather than as a minister, that at the moment it has made me use a term that is certainly inadequate, which I am first and foremost sorry for”
He then concluded his apology by stating: “I reconfirm, however, the full meaning of the message: the society of arrogance must respond with the enhancement of the culture of respect and limits and with the rediscovery of the fundamental value of humility”.
But the patch may not hide the hole. What the Minister of Education and Merit (name specially coined in this legislature) affirms, denotes an ignorance of the pedagogical and educational processes that every school teacher, for every order and level, should be required to know. The path of change undertaken by the world of school education in the last century in our country has tended as much as possible to eliminate humiliation and hurtful punishment towards pupils because, simply, they are counterproductive and bring no benefit to those suffers.
It is interesting to note how Valditara speaks of a “society of arrogance” but then, apologizing, reconfirms the goodness of the first message pronounced by making it a linguistic problem on the term, which was actually perfectly in line with the general discourse expressed. The use of the extreme case of a student who has used physical violence against a teacher is a very useful rhetorical trick but it is also a logical error, because it reduces the phenomenon to its extreme. A phenomenon that is actually much more complex and must be fought in many ways, but one could hardly wish for the “barracks” method of socially useful work.
The minister’s statements have aroused dismay and condemnation from many quarters, ranging from the political opposition to the world of teachers. Angelo Bonelli of the Verdi-Left Alliance underlined how the one used is a lexicon proper to the fascist period: «Humiliation? It is this government that humiliates the country. That this language reminiscent of the Ventennio is used is a shame. This is a minister who cannot be the minister of education. It’s a shame to have such a minister.”