Home » To target students, a new role model is needed – Christian Raimo

To target students, a new role model is needed – Christian Raimo

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To target students, a new role model is needed – Christian Raimo

Orientation is a very plastic term. It may have to do with our ability to make forward-thinking decisions, to quote the subtitle of a wonderful book by Steven Johnson that has just come out for Erickson, Darwin’s Wife. And clearly it is a very important issue in education and education policies, especially when they are linked to employment policies. Orientation is talked about more and more often in conferences, public occasions, festivals.

From 25 to 27 November 2021, the JobOrienta conference took place at the Verona fair, one of the most important appointments on the subject of work-related orientation, which was attended by 35 thousand people, according to the organizers. In the meeting with the regional councilors, Education Minister Patrizio Bianchi said: “The idea that guidance can be reduced to last summer’s marketing is outdated. The orientation must be done by the whole school, together with the families. The ‘affectionate’ school, in which the sense of self is fundamental, accompanies the boys on their journey: all equally dignified journeys, which must lead to personal fulfilment”. Guidance is not, guidance must be: it is already clear from this approach that talking about guidance and planning the consequent policies is complicated.

It is therefore useful to clarify the terms of the question. Especially considering that, as Bianchi recalled, the reform of guidance is “one of the most important in the context of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Pnrr)”. In fact, the plan reserves one billion euros for the reform of the guidance system: a lot of money.

On Italia Domani, the government website that should illustrate the Pnrr projects as they take shape, there is not even a draft of this reform, only two lines that speak of “introducing educational guidance for the fourth and fifth grade secondary school, and accompany students in choosing a course of study or further vocational training (Its), preparatory to entering the world of work for about 30 hours a year”. One thing, however, is clear: orientation will become ever more cardinal in training and job introduction policies, it is one of the cornerstones of the spirit of the Pnrr. But companies and the world of education do not always share the same conception.

At JobOrienta Ilenia Cavo, councilor for education of the Liguria region, on behalf of her colleagues and colleagues handed over to Minister Bianchi the Charter of Genoa, a programmatic document presented at the Orientamenti exhibition, which was held in Genoa from 12 to 14 November (45 thousand presences). The preamble reads: “It is important that young people become familiar with the world of work, knowing the productive sectors, the professional figures and the dynamics in relation to the trends and evolutions of the local labor markets”. The analysis of the needs of these markets should shape guidance policies and therefore the choices of those who go to school: “Companies are considered a privileged place for learning and guidance”, where students can “compare aspirations of each with the working reality, thus verifying whether the choice of profession actually corresponds to one’s vocation”.

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Companies and the world of education do not always share the same conception

Ultimately, therefore, what should change in the school curriculum? Orientation should become part of the teaching activities (thirty hours in middle school and thirty in high school); training plans should be established for every girl and boy; the job offer that comes from the local area should be disclosed as much as possible with visits to companies, “employment testimonials” at school and an increase in the so-called “orientation salons” such as Orientamenti and JobOrienta.

There are two phenomena that we want to contrast with this reform: the high percentage of neet (from the English neither in employment or in education or training, i.e. girls and boys who do not study, do not work and are not undergoing training courses); and the mismatchi.e. the asymmetry between the demands of the world of work and the offers of the training world.

Undersecretary for Education Barbara Floridia is following the reform firsthand. “It’s important to stay in school and get to know yourself, because by knowing yourself you understand what you’re good at, and this helps you choose. In the past, orientation was seen as an informational moment, and it is no longer enough in an accelerated era in which changes even in the working world are continuous ”, she tells Essential. “Today we have to talk about new skills. In addition to soft skillsthere are the green skills: the green skills that all companies want”.

The voice of companies is crucial. For years Giovanni Brugnoli, vice president for human capital of Confindustria, has been repeating that it is important to guide young people’s expectations towards the potential of manufacturing. In 2019 he declared: “In the next three years, in six key sectors of Made in Italy we will have a shortage of personnel. Unfortunately, the curricula of the young people are disconnected from the requests of the companies”. In a more recent interview he insisted on the need to “focus on training that adheres to the needs of the productive world. Guidance ”, he added,“ must start from middle school, and teachers must be trained for guidance. On ITS, the goal is to increase quality courses, not foundations”.

ITS (Higher Technical Institutes) are non-university post-secondary level schools, which can be accessed with a high school diploma. They are still not widespread and little known. The training is carried out in collaboration with companies, universities, research centers and local authorities, especially in industrial districts. Today there are just over a hundred ITS, but with the Pnrr Minister Bianchi wants to multiply and enhance them. They are a model often cited as a response to mismatches, because – it is said – a significant percentage of the students who attend them manage to find work immediately.

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The mismatch issue has been dragging on for centuries. Between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century we find many public statements – by intellectuals such as Piero Gobetti or Piero Calamandrei – on the question of the “displaced” and the “intellectual proletariat”, that is, graduates in the humanities who remained without work. Gaetano Salvemini in 1908 asked to make the school system more efficient and selective with “the outlet of practical schools”. In 1974 a classic text by Marzio Barbagli, Intellectual unemployment and the school system in Italy: 1859-1973 (Il Mulino), called into question the belief that, in the face of what we now call a mismatch, the Italian school should have paid more attention to companies. And he showed how this conviction had legitimized a reform, that of Giovanni Gentile, which had turned out to be classist, reinforcing the selection and early orientation. Even today, as numerous researches show, the orientation processes at the end of each school cycle reproduce social, gender and ethnic inequalities.

The ambition of the Charter of Genoa and Confindustria is clear: to strengthen the guidance system to avoid mismatches and promote social cohesion, intervening on early school leaving, helping neets and increasing average education levels.

But is the method commensurate with the objectives? According to the Flc CGIL it is too biased towards companies. “We need an approach to knowledge that brings out attitudes, a critical spirit and skills”, denounces the secretary Manuela Calza. “The thirty hours of orientation at school is not the best idea to build it.”

The impression is that a vision of guidance passed off as new isn’t so at all. There are in fact two historical residues. The first is the idea according to which students should be helped to direct their educational and professional paths on the basis of talents, inclinations and abilities that are supposed to be innate but which instead depend on the family and social contexts in which they grew up. The second is a more recent attitude, of a neoliberal matrix, according to which guidance should allow girls and boys to acquire basic skills useful for planning and re-planning their study and life paths in order to adapt to the needs of a capitalism increasingly unstable like that of the last thirty years.

As it is emerging, the guidance system in Italy seems to be centered on individuals and on the need to seize the opportunities offered by new technologies, in order to become increasingly personalised. In this way it should solve as if by magic a series of problems which are, in reality, structural: the shortcomings of the school, the enormous economic, social and cultural gaps, and above all the limits of Italian companies. What pedagogical ideas have entrepreneurs expressed in recent decades?

In short, there is the risk of attributing to individuals – especially the most vulnerable, those who today have fewer resources to implement “successful” trajectories – the responsibility for the structural deficiencies in which they are immersed.

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Alternatively, one can think of a different conception of orientation. For years now, professionals and researchers have been directing the debate and interventions in completely different directions. The Italian Society for Orientation observed that “the idea emerges in several points in the Pnrr that providing orientation means initiating processes of matching between the characteristics of individuals and the demands of work contexts, using profiling procedures”. It would be “the main way to increase inequalities and act not in harmony with research in the sector”.

We need to act on social justice, environmental sustainability and inclusion

Laura Nota, professor at the University of Padua and director of the Research and Intervention Laboratory for Choice Guidance (Larios), says that today there is “the need for guidance that leads both children and adults to acquire skills of reading the context to build new visions of the future”.

Already in 2013 the International Association of Educational and Vocational Guidance warned against an orientation “guided by the ever increasing demands of the labor market”. On the contrary, guidance must be based on an overview, “in which the complex development needs of all communities are considered” and offer “a specific contribution to the development of critical thinking, regardless of the theme of employment prospects”.

Highlighting this independence is not just a matter of principle. Two visions collide: if it is the companies that guide the training orientation, we will insist on short times, if we rely on a pedagogical perspective, we think on long-term perspectives. This is the thesis of the most important contemporary pedagogists, from John Dewey to Jerome Bruner, and above all of the Italian ones, from Aldo Visalberghi to Benedetto Vertecchi.

Cristiano Corsini, professor of pedagogy at the Roma Tre University, tries to clarify this: “It is assumed that companies only look for people with critical skills, capable of getting involved, but I doubt it. Furthermore, the relationship between work and education is unbalanced, it is believed that companies must regulate education and that education cannot teach companies anything”.

We need to act on social justice, environmental sustainability and inclusion, both at school and in the workplace. In Italy, Larios has promoted interventions aimed at students and young adults looking for employment, encouraging them to acquire knowledge and relational skills to create more inclusive and sustainable work and educational contexts. Not only that, girls and boys were invited to reflect on the dynamics of exploitation and to imagine ways to help transform the world.

It is clear how reductive the perspective that becoming an adult means entering the job market is. However, even the ambition to know oneself is not enough to better orient oneself in the world that already exists. The new possibility that comes from the younger generations every time is to change everything in surprising ways.

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