But will digitalization really save schools?
Technologies help – there is no doubt – as long as they do not replace the commitment to study, the necessary sacrifices, the basic learning. The speech by Francesco Provinciali, former MIUR and Ministry of Education inspection manager
There was once a joke among teachers: between depending on the Superintendency or the Ministry, almost everyone chose the second option for the simple fact that the Ministry was physically further away. Less breathing down their necks and greater teaching autonomy allowed teachers to express the best of themselves, in the classroom, with their students.
Rhetorically in those years there was talk of an "educational mission": it may have been an emphatic statement but that generation of teachers and professors (I had two at home, my father and my mother) contributed to the literacy of the country and heads emerged from that school thinking, solid learning and skills that can be used in professional life.
Since then there has been – there has always been – a conflicting relationship between bureaucracy and teaching, between circulars and working with one's students. Circulars arrived galore, there was the order and then the counter-order: with common sense, the Educational Directors and Principals filtered the necessary from the superfluous and redundant.
I remember that in 1976 I published an article entitled "Programmare è simplificare" in Scuola Italiana Moderna: I received a complimentary phone call from the editor of the magazine, who told me that I had been right and proposed that I join the editorial team. I didn't do it and I preferred to try my hand at the path I then followed and which allowed me to immerse myself in the "militant school" and then in juvenile justice for almost half a century.
47 years have passed since that article and I would rewrite it verbatim because in the meantime a plethora of new words, indications, documents, standards, codes and codicils have accumulated which have made, if anything, more urgent, along the way and today, the task, or rather the duty of simplification in the planning and organizational procedures of the school system.
Too much has come between teaching and learning, in the meantime the corollaries, the Cartesian coordinates, the flow diagrams, the check ups and the check ins have grown. If previously school managers and teachers had to rack their brains in interpreting the ministerial "cries" and in the end a sort of 'applicative common sense' prevailed to make the school systems work, now to that bureaucracy that comes from the center – made up of decrees, circulars , directives, regulatory interpretations and teaching guidelines, national projects that generate working groups at every level and rivers of largely useless words – the bureaucracy generated by school autonomy has been added, schools resemble para-military structures led by managers that politics wanted to define as sheriffs and ship captains as garrisons.
The climate has changed (now it's called climax) and having remained in the loop I collect confessions from former colleagues, new managers, teachers overwhelmed by a mounting drift of bureaucratic complications which – it is useful to underline – pervasive digitalisation sometimes makes even unsustainable.
Having been a decent teacher, a mediocre director and a terrible inspector, I feel entitled to listen to the various cahiers de doléances: infinite examples could be given to demonstrate that a path has been taken that has made everything more complex, tiring and difficult.
Unfortunately, the results do not correspond to expectations since PISA and INVALSI, OECD capture trends of educational impoverishment in the educational outcomes of pupils. Technologies help – there is no doubt – as long as they do not replace the commitment to study, the necessary sacrifices, the basic learning.
There are students who have difficulty writing, reading and arithmetic. Calculators, smartphones, tablets have replaced manual dexterity, texts written with pen, spelling is usually neglected, syntax is skipped altogether, subjunctives and conditionals are confused with each other, algorithms and game based learning have undermined algebraic operations and math problems. Multiplication tables, poems, themes, dictations are buried by new semantic and expressive codes, history and geography almost canceled even in high schools. Replaced by the use of videos, evaluation through quizzes and tests, it eliminates narration, the ability to summarize, expound, since the concepts have been replaced by problem solving and multiple choice answers.
Teachers are no better off starting from the forced implementation of the differentiation of tasks and roles, one becomes a simple apprentice and the other tutor depending on the projects studied at the table and almost never implemented, the tendency is to create increasingly more pedagogical metatheories convoluted that usually translate into a cryptic symbolism made of circles, arrows, intersections, sets that intersect in project work.
Can a teacher become an "objective function" and then convert into an "instrumental function"? And does teaching necessarily have to borrow languages, theories, acronyms, acronyms, formulas from experiences in other countries?
Anyone who reads the training plan envisaged by the PNRR will find an all-encompassing preponderance of English and teaching based almost exclusively on digitalisation: it is difficult to integrate innovation into the consolidated pedagogical tradition, a substitute logic prevails.
Then there are the bureaucratic exasperations of which school autonomy becomes the driving force of infinite multiplication: plethoric and intensively scheduled meetings, circulars in greater numbers than ministerial ones, often contradicting each other.
A national school system, with its history and its traditions, its characteristics and its pedagogical fundamentals must continue to exist: Censis has detected a cultural impoverishment of the country, ISTAT has raised the alarm about empty cradles, we were waiting for Elon Musk coming to recommend us to have more children.
But the problems, even emotional and emotional ones, are more complicated: there is a palpable emerging struggle to live, in the new generations even a tangible fear of loving. The theme of sentimental education emerged urgently from a serious news story: I have been writing about it for ten years but I do not reduce it to a school subject but rather consider it – like civic education – a transversal educational approach, which must permeate relationships, human relationships, crossing individual disciplines until becoming part of them, lifestyles, the ethics of teaching and that of learning while respecting the authority and authoritativeness of the school.
We need ethos and pathos and we must not take the digital, AI, metaverse and cloud drift as a categorical imperative.
The formation of critical minds remains the absolute goal of all training as it is a prerequisite for values such as freedom and democracy. This is why I express a specific concern: the directives that impose digitalisation as the only mandatory way in which to channel teaching and learning, in addition to generating a new, cryptic as well as vulnerable and ephemeral bureaucracy, will sooner or later end up taking away the freedom of teaching as an indispensable value. For this reason the art. 33 of the Constitution can never be obscured by a structuring of our school system according to alignment if not homologation criteria. The topic is of absolute importance and concerns not only the future of a profession, its know-how, but the tomorrow (perhaps already today) of our children and the very clear model of society that we must have in mind.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/ma-davvero-la-digitalizzazione-salvera-la-scuola/ on Sat, 24 Feb 2024 06:59:19 +0000.