We know little about the new school in Valditara, but we are already fighting each other
For a few days we have been witnessing a sort of online revolt regarding the new ministerial indications for the first cycle of education: professors, artists, indignant and outraged politicians, long and in-depth comments, clearly because each of us feels the extreme need to have his say. . When it comes to school, this tendency becomes particularly evident: each of us must tell the whole world about our experience with Latin, with poetry, with the recorder, and draw from it a definitive judgment on what it would be appropriate to let the little ones do. students.
It’s a shame that these Indications don’t even exist at present: all we have is Valditara’s interview with Il Giornale. We therefore have nothing in our hands that we can read, analyze and therefore comment on; the interview, obviously, reports the intentions of the minister, whose words are always – let’s not forget – aimed at keeping the electorate happy, and probably also at stirring up the controversy mentioned above. In short, we know what inspired the innovations (or their opposite), but not what they will actually consist of.
The interview doesn’t say much concrete
Therefore, rather than commenting on the indications, I would comment on the fact that we are arguing about nothing, right now. I am certainly not saying that no one should have reacted to the interview given by the minister: it is inevitable and even right to do so. But it depends on how we react, because we don’t understand much from the interview, given the rather vague statements, and we suspect that some of the statements are made on purpose to make people angry. For example, what does it mean “centrality will be restored to the narrative of what happened in our peninsula from ancient times until today” and “the history of Italy, Europe and the West will be privileged”? Things are already like this: we study the history of Italy and Europe, I don’t know that it is very common in Italian schools to delve into Chinese dynasties or the cultures of Central Africa, much less during the first cycle of education.
It therefore seems like a purely propaganda phrase that makes voters happy and opponents dissatisfied: bingo, in short. From here arises a quantity of content including articles, videos and interviews, which does nothing but confuse ideas: the minister’s words are inflated and finally transformed into something else, as always happens.
With strokes of indignation, we arrive at hoaxes
We see it in the question of Latin, which seems to be the real scandal of these new Indications. Everyone says that now there will be Latin in middle school again: my God, but how? The kids don’t even know Italian, they have difficulty with mathematics, and we go back to the times of the Gentile reform! But the interview talks about the possibility of including it as optional, it doesn’t talk about obligation at all. So we don’t understand the reasons for so much uproar, for the many comments and articles that speak with great alarm about a return to the past.
Similarly, the angry comments of the supporters of scientific knowledge (those who pit it against humanistic knowledge, in a ridiculous competition to see who has the longest) on the minister’s declaration of “more literature” really make me smile, as if this automatically implied less mathematics and science: we don’t know, precisely because we haven’t read the text yet. Certainly, if this is the case, it will be worth protesting, but doing so now is completely meaningless.
The impression one gets is therefore that, as always, people react on the basis of their political and ideological positioning: if I belong to the no Latin, yes sciences faction (idiotic faction that shouldn’t exist, just like its opposite), I will declare myself against Valditara; if I am a supporter of the government, I will declare myself in favor, regardless of the actual content of the new indications. In all this without it occurring to anyone that, in any case, to evaluate what is appropriate to teach in the first years of compulsory schooling, specific skills are needed (which are not necessarily possessed by our minister, obviously, nor by those with whom he consulted – including, according to what he himself reported, even people who have never known where teaching and pedagogy belong).
It is depressing to observe how schools continue to remain a terrain of propaganda and slogans, which regularly distance us from its structural and organizational (as well as economic) problems, and from the scandalous ways in which teachers are selected. Let’s realize that no media outcry has arisen over the absurdities of the last two Pnrr competitions, indecent from every possible point of view, but we are all here bleating against a compulsory Latin which in reality, according to what has been said so far, will be optional. If we haven’t yet understood that we are taking the bait like fish, ready to be boiled, Latin is the least of our problems.