Mobile phones are forbidden in the classroom, says the Minister of Education and Merit, reiterating a ban that has already been in place for some time and therefore not saying anything new but giving a clear signal to the school world all the same: recreation too, like the free ride evoked by other ministers is over; with recreation, meaning not the wrong use of smartphones during lessons, which must always be censored; but that attempt, indeed that long season, in which digital was discussed at school to improve it, to make lessons more engaging and participatory, to ultimately make studying more exciting.
For a school without grades
by Riccardo Luna
There was a time when we fervently talked about ebooks to replace paper books and not just to save a few trees, but because videos, interactive tests and animated graphics could be introduced digitally (given the backpacks that students still use , I’d say we totally failed, the school publishers and their profits won).
And then we were fighting for wifi at school and for the need to connect all schools with ultra-broadband. And this not to chat with classmates but to do different lessons, horizontal, not only from the desk, frontal, as happened to us, our parents, our grandparents and the parents of our grandparents and so on until the mists of time. The more experienced then enthusiastically debated the Finnish model and the flipped classroom, and the importance of a different didactics in which of course, merit counted and notions counted, but above all the ability to instill in the boys a passion for knowledge and curiosity for the future, the only tools with which to really grow. And instead that season now seems to be over, in fact all these things have disappeared from the minister’s speeches.
Full speed ahead, we go back, to the school of the past. The past never passes away from us.