Are we building the school of the future well?
Pnrr funds for schools and a certain digital 4.0 dogma between theories and reality. The speech by Francesco Provinciali, former MIUR and Ministry of Education inspection manager
After the President of Consob Giuseppe Vegas ( Il Messaggero of 27/8) now also the emeritus judge of the Constitutional Court Sabino Cassese ( Il Corriere della Sera of 15/12) engages in a reflection on the current conditions of the Italian school system. Both examinations boast the merit of the authoritativeness of the reviewers and their ability to grasp some macro evidence: they are observations made from the heights of prestigious roles corroborated by the charisma of the editorialists. And in common they express more reservations than appreciation on the strategic choices that characterize our school system.
I have already written about the Vegas article ("The cultural misunderstanding that is ruining school autonomy"), I would now like to focus on Prof. Cassese's merciless and truthful investigation of a historically consolidated drift in Italian school policy in recent decades : that of the plethoric conversions in the role of temporary teaching staff, a drift that Cassese notes is preponderant compared to other needs of the school.
Cassese writes: “We can ask ourselves: which interest comes first, that of the education of Italians or that of the placement of teachers in their roles?…. “What drives the State to hire: temporary workers who want to take up a job or the need for better education?”.
The results produced by this choice are not comforting: compared to spending on education equal to 4.2% of GDP (the average figure recorded by the OECD is 5.1%), considering only secondary education, in In Italy we have 11 students per teacher in the high school course and 9 per teacher in the technical-professional one, while the OECD average is 14 and 15 students respectively. On the other hand, the salaries of Italian teachers are the lowest in Europe, where they have grown by 1% per year since 2015 while in Italy they have decreased by 1.3%.
In essence, Prof. Cassese wonders whether the priority is that of a periodic batch of temporary workers considering how the selection criteria do not correspond to qualitative expectations. It should be noted that in a school system that is moving towards the digital transition, which entails a prevalence of evaluation of pupils increasingly carried out through quizzes and multiple choice tests, a mirrored selection of teaching staff carried out in a minimalist way through quizzes and simulated lessons.
I don't think it escapes Prof. Cassese like the so-called. "school of the past" was more selective with respect to the criterion of merit and the evaluation of skills, while postulating principles such as the right to study and equality of educational opportunities. Just scroll through the dozens and dozens of pages of the PNRR Futura School platform for a "school 4.0" to understand how teacher training and related teaching according to the DIG COMP EDU standards for teachers and DIG COMP 2.2 for pupils is monopolized by methodologies centered on digital, technologies and AI
As has been pointed out several times, it is a pedagogy inspired by models borrowed from Anglo-Saxon countries, in language (Italian is disappearing in relational interlocutions, in the commands of the activities to be set up, in organizational structures) where acronyms, formulas and acronyms prevail according to a preponderant mechanistic approach with resolutive and palingenetic ambition: apply these methods to overturn a merely transmissive and frontal conception of teachings/learning.
It is not for nothing that a conceptual and factual reversal is hypothesized: the student (especially in our pedagogical tradition) has always been at the center of the educational process but now the teacher becomes "guide" or "director", a circular relationship is hypothesized at of training/self-training, evaluation/self-evaluation and the former classes become 'flipped class rooms', i.e. "reversed classes".
Digital literacy imposes and follows the massive use of technologies, tablets, smartphones and PCs replace books, pens and notebooks, videos impose a focus centered not on research but on the use of information, while tests replace narrative exposition (whether vocal or written) by answering the prevalent pre-determined multiple choice questions. Arguing is replaced by choosing between multiple already written answers.
Now I think that Prof. Cassese – a mind open to the new and therefore inclined to deal with technologies and AI as an obvious and unavoidable choice or drift – has highlighted a plague in our school system in the plethora of poorly paid teachers. I would humbly wish that this rampant and pervasive digital methodology, often uncritically assumed as the panacea for the atavistic evils of the Italian school, deserved the same consideration.
In the future we will therefore have classrooms equipped with increasingly sophisticated technologies to understand factual reality and build augmented reality, we will have mixed, thematic and hybrid classes, teaching will be based on game-based learning and gamification, instead of pens we will press buttons and – by applying Bloom's entire taxonomy (but it has already been used for several decades) or by making use of the Metaverse we will lead the pupils and the entire school group one by one towards the ambitious goal of problem solving: this consists in the mechanistic perspective of an automated learning process that I have criticized, since it seems to me that schemes and procedures are built around the table that do not take into account, for example, the personal dimension inherent in each student.
A 'logical' analysis of the object of study and the procedures to be applied is carried out but not enough thought is given to the 'psychological' analysis of the student who has to learn them. I have already written that this drift uncritically assumed even at a political level as an institutional 'mission' to be fulfilled (at EU level these directives which move towards school 4.0 actually take over from individual national study programmes, the prevailing Anglicism promotes the knowledge of a universal language but puts the national one in rapid decline, the criterion of "alignment" between tradition and innovation – taking into account the previous culture to insert the new one – is more a hypothetical conjecture than an easily practicable path) becomes the pedagogical dogma to be adopted and apply. Without taking into account that in this precise historical period, countries such as Sweden and Finland (which had eliminated italics in favor of typing) are abandoning tablets and smartphones to return to using pens, notebooks and books.
It is not just the results of the PISA or INVALSI assessments, the OECD research that demonstrates that the logic of et-et rather than that of aut-aut is truly more inclusive from a cultural point of view. A reminder for Minister Valditara who has already expressed his opinion in this sense. True courage does not consist in applying innovation outright but in reconciling it with a tradition that is part of the culture and history of each country.
One also wonders where we will put all this technology that will equip the "open classes" and computer laboratories of the future: given that a large part of schools consists of crumbling, dilapidated, unsafe and dangerous school buildings. Wasn't it better to use PNRR funds to secure schools? Finally, add a very concrete observation that escapes the analyzes of eminent intellectuals who have not set foot in a school since they entered it as pupils: from many quarters (school directors, teachers, parents…) there are alarming signals, the children do not know how to write below dictation, they are unable to draw up a shopping list, they give up at the fourth line of an essay and – where the italics have been suppressed – they don't know what "putting your signature" means.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/stiamo-costruendo-bene-la-scuola-del-futuro/ on Sun, 07 Jan 2024 09:42:59 +0000.