Counter-order, comrades! Rise and fall of digital education
A person informed of the facts writes to me, commenting on this newspaper clipping:
Spectacular! Twenty years of the left in government with the few who observed that perhaps too much digital wasn't good for schools were ridiculed because they were considered outdated and now that a right-wing minister is doing something real in this sense, "we need more"!
But when the 7th of the Senate published the results of the survey on the impact of digital on students , in June 2021, who was Minister of Education?
One De Passage
To the last question from Uno De Passaggio (a distant cousin of Uno Normale, the mythical entity you look for when you have to deal with appointments, knowing full well that in the quantum physics of appointments Bagnai's uncertainty principle applies: "Since naming means interact, this precludes the psychiatric integrity of the named subject"), the last question, I was saying, is easy to answer. The document was approved on 9 June 2021, and therefore the minister of education was him , the student of Prodi and Quadrio Curzio (and if I, who am in the profession, had to go and look it up on Google, there must be a reason).
Those (few) who observed that too much, but also too little, digital is not very good for teaching, not only primary, not only secondary, but also tertiary, those in the profession remember them, and one is here :
and he explained to you why and how he wanted to hold what would later be his last doctoral course (but in September 2017 I would never have thought of writing to you one day from San Macuto, whose existence I didn't know…) using a blackboard of slate, laboriously chased through the classrooms of D'Annunzio: they were rare objects already in 2017, before the barbarians of the wheeled desks threw the few remaining specimens from the windows of our schools, shattering them, to obey the wicked orders of their Chinese masters.
What did the PD want then? Do you remember it? He obviously wanted modernity and progress, consistently with the progressive inspiration of which he feels he is the sole and only interpreter. And of course modernity was cchiù pilu, sorry: more digital for everyone, and at all ages. Giorgio Matteucci spoke about it to us at length, with others, in this conference organized by a/symmetrie in Parliament , but in short I think you remember the trend. The National Digital School Plan (PNSD: how could we do without an acronym? And what would an acronym be if it were not unpronounceable?), that "fundamental pillar of La Buona Scuola" (law 107/2015)", as defined by the website of the ministry , he had been fired by another minister whose memory is fleeting, but his membership indelible: Stefania Giannini , a valued member of the Renzi government (#DAR)!
How could the apple have fallen far from such a tree?
You can find it summarized here in just 35 points , among which we find BYOD (i.e.: bring your mobile phone to class!), the electronic register (i.e.: free yourself from responsibility and unlearn how to write), the minimum standards for online teaching (i.e.: there they wanted to stop and it didn't seem true to them that they had a compelling reason to accelerate along that path), in short: lammerda de lammerda de lammerda (no offense to the feces), all proposed by who? But it is clear: from the political referents of the engaged intellectuals who are "innocent" today and why? Because someone said enough, but he didn't say it enough, so much so that we need to hit him like the Black Death !
But how?
When the minister was yours you advocated BYOD, and now that our minister opposes Renzi's BYOD, do you become supinely (I was writing swinely) and subserviently against BYOD too? Like this, de botto!? It might seem paradoxical, but the paradox is explained if we remember that whatever you do, you do it, and above all you tell it, in a better way, which legitimizes your most acrobatic about-faces (just think of the PdR wannabe who easily passed from austerity to eight hundred billion – or rather: billions – of investments)!
Because Fedeli opened on the cell phone in class in 2017 (when I was struggling to find real slate and real chalk: my personal raw materials crisis had just begun!), but you, dear intellectuals, are silent! In any case, the escape route was already ready: if all this digitalisation (which couldn't have worked) hadn't worked, the fault would have been with the teachers , not yours or your strategists ! Exactly like the failure of the euro, which could not work, is clearly the fault of the Ox people, not of the refined intellectuals who conceived it (we mentioned one)!
And this too, somehow, is a QED …
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2024/09/contrordine-compagni-ascesa-e-caduta.html on Thu, 12 Sep 2024 13:53:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.