By abandoning language policy and Italian schools abroad, Italy renounces its soft power
We gladly receive and publish this article by Silvia Giugni, linguist and language teacher, former director of the PLIDA of the Dante Alighieri Society
Italian language policy since the 1990s has been in constant and irremediable decline. A decline that certainly has to do with the lack of economic resources in which the Italian State finds itself, but also (and perhaps above all) with the lack of awareness that public administrators (MAECI and MIUR) and successive governments have demonstrated and demonstrate towards of soft power . Therefore, unlike other European states that have increased investments in the dissemination and promotion of their own language over the last 20 years, Italy has increasingly reduced the resources available to language policy. The continuous reduction of investments led to the closure of several Italian schools abroad, the reduction of the Italian Cultural Institutes (transforming the remaining ones, deprived of a decent budget, often into pure "symbolic" representations), the reduction of places reading, teaching and linguistic assistance at foreign universities and schools, training and refresher courses for teachers of Italian, etc.
The closure of the Italian school of Asmara, a historical school founded 120 years ago, is the latest episode of this sad decline. The school was closed at the end of August by the Eritrean state, because the Italian state had drastically reduced the funding for the school and had stopped sending mother tongue teachers from Italy. In the affair, our current government particularly stood out for its inability to mediate with the Eritrean state in order to find a solution that would allow the school to remain in business. President Conte himself got involved, but without getting anything.
On the other hand, the closure of the Asmara school is not an event that can surprise those who follow the government's "language policy" (and unfortunately also that of many governments that preceded it). Italian schools abroad are the foundation on which Italian language policy is historically based and focused. Opened starting in 1862, first in the Mediterranean basin, then in the Americas and Europe, today they have been gradually reduced to 7 (Addis Ababa, Athens, Barcelona, Istanbul, Madrid, Paris and Zurich). Over the last 20-30 years, the others have been closed or converted into private schools (today equal Italian schools), financed to an increasingly negligible extent by the Italian state and controlled by it through the ministerial recognition of the qualification. With the decree law 64 of 2017 and then with the ministerial decree 2051 of 2018, the financial contribution to schools abroad (both the now 7 remaining state-owned and the 43 private ones recognized by the state and defined by the decree itself as "equal") has further decreased (in addition, the teachers sent from Italy were further reduced and the substitutes abolished).
Today the 7 remaining Italian state schools risk closure due to lack of funds and the lack of mother tongue teachers (and due to a lack of didactic and promotional strategies).
The 43 equal Italian schools (that is, in fact private but recognized by the state) scattered around the world and managed by autonomous bodies now receive scant funding (in many cases the funding does not reach 10 percent of their income) and must use almost all teachers found locally and not part of the Italian ministerial rankings. Faced with so little economic and organizational commitment by the state, private schools must however strictly and rigidly adhere to the programs and curricula of the Italian school (MIUR) without any specificity, adaptation or strategies related to the area in which they operate and their recipients. That is, in the face of a minimum financial commitment and little attention paid to specific educational and didactic issues on the part of Italy, schools must comply with the rigorous Italian ministerial guidelines: top down management by the Italian state, without the possibility of part of the schools of no participation in concerted choices between actors and subjects in the field. Top-down management has also become less and less efficient from both a decision-making and an operational point of view following the establishment of the MAECI-MIUR co-management (again decree law 64/2017) in place of the previous management of the MAECI.
If the 7 state schools risk closure, the 43 peer schools (which the MAECI presents and boasts as Italian schools claiming merits and actions) risk abandoning the boat and becoming autonomous in all respects: funding and teachers from Italy, their link with Italy, based purely on the equal recognition of qualifications, becomes increasingly weak in the face of the spread of international schools and international qualifications throughout the world.
The situation of schools abroad, the fulcrum of language policy, therefore appears worrying, just as the growing disengagement of the Italian government and state in the field of soft power (of which language policy is a fundamental and essential part) appears worrying. The damages of this disengagement can be read in many fields and are not unrelated to the loss of political importance of Italy at the international level. Furthermore, one of the most serious and worrying immediate effects is the loss of attraction of our very valid higher education abroad (very low number of foreign students in our universities). Finally, it should be emphasized that what has been missing so far in the ministerial and political approach is not just money: certainly, as mentioned, the scarcity of resources has led to certain choices, or rather to certain non-choices (although in the past two decades in this coveted money has been spent not a few and badly). In fact, there are several initiatives at zero or almost no cost that could be successfully applied to begin planning a relaunch of the promotion and dissemination of Italian (a language that has its own fortune despite the unfortunate language policies, but which in the long run cannot live only of that). Unfortunately, what has been lacking and what seems to be missing is the will and a strategic and realistic vision.
The post Abandoning language policy and Italian schools abroad, Italy renounces its soft power appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/abbandonando-politica-linguistica-e-scuole-italiane-allestero-litalia-rinuncia-al-suo-soft-power/ on Fri, 25 Sep 2020 03:37:00 +0000.