For a new educated ruling class there is a need to reform the school

3 January 20231 year ago babelfish

The educational poverty that characterizes the ruling class is the result of the devastating dismantling of education by unprepared, incompetent ministers and their advisers. That's why it's time for teachers and professors to refound the school to save the new generations. The speech by Alessandra Servidori, professor of labor policies

Certainly Italy needs a new educated ruling class and De Rita is right when he says that if we don't grow we will remain mortifyingly mediocre also because we have massacred our school and education. We have destroyed the high humanistic culture which the current political generation lacks, which has very much thought of gathering consensus to indulge the masses but unable to make citizens grow and President Mattarella is right when he urges young people to recover even a culture humanities to enrich the now evidently degraded knowledge and language and not knowing how to understand or write, possessing a lack of knowledge with a devastating illiteracy that stifled the possibility of expressing merit.

Already Pietro Calamandrei in 1950 exhorted us to defend the democratic school that corresponds to the democratic Constitution that we wanted to give ourselves; the school that is in function of this Constitution, which can be an instrument, for this Constitution written on paper to become reality.

The school, the central organ of democracy, because it serves to solve what we believe is the central problem of democracy: the formation of the ruling class. The formation of the ruling class, not only in the sense of the political class, i.e. that class that sits in Parliament and discusses and speaks and is at the top of the more properly political bodies, but also the ruling class in the cultural and technical sense: those who are at head of workshops and companies, who teach, who write, artists, professionals, poets.

This is the problem of democracy, the creation of this class, which must not be a hereditary, closed caste: in the thought of democracy, the ruling class must be open and always renewed by the upward influx of the best elements of all classes, of all categories. It has been at least since the end of the First Republic that Italy has had a problem of the ruling class, of its weakness/absence, which does not have an overall vision of its own country, an indispensable condition for imagining its future, for imagining the type of society, values and interests that it must try to embody. And it is because one is not able to possess adequate knowledge of the country itself and of the world.

The essential thing is to know the past, the political events, the culture, the sensitivity, and therefore having read books, novels, having seen films, listening to music, having studied. The present and the future are built on solid foundations only by knowing the past, it is no coincidence that the forge of the ruling classes has always been history. We need personal disinterest (which is evidently lacking in the Italian leadership), we need a sense of the state. It is the idea that in one's action the interest of the community is impartially evaluated: a ruling class is such if it is capable of "assuming responsibility", that is, if it knows how to make decisions. If he knows how to compromise himself by deciding.

It is education that is lacking today, the one with a strong presence of the humanities; the knowledge of the various disciplines and not the so-called "skills", the "know-how"; and in which, finally, proceedings are based exclusively on criteria of merit. The ruling classes are formed only by assuming as a basis a broad and in-depth general knowledge which gives them the flexibility, the ability to orientate, the breadth of horizons, which serve to make those choices of a general scope and of a complex nature which are the typical choices that they compete with a ruling class, with ethical and political models of behavior inspired by the values of activity in public life.

A devastating dismantling of education by unprepared, incompetent ministers and their advisers has taken place in our school. Dismantling that went hand in hand with that of the school-educational system as a whole. The Italian "educational poverty" lies indeed in the low number of university students, but it lies above all in the unpreparedness of a large part of them, often unable to write without gruesome spelling and punctuation errors.

Then the role of the so-called productive bourgeoisie as a ruling class must be as concrete, correct, modern and efficient as possible. Instead it is true that in too many companies, in their ownership structure, in their size, in the scarcity of investments, which too often lies the root cause of the weakness of the Italian "human capital" and the total lack of relationship between education, territory, businesses .

So basically you cannot destroy a country without first destroying its conscience of being such; and that awareness comes from history and school thirty years of systematic devaluation of public education and the country. From the "charter of services" of the industrialist Lombardi (minister in 1995), with the student-client and the anonymous letters to evaluate the teachers, everything has become "normal". Normal with Berlinguer, equalizing gaps in mathematics with "credits" in motor education, Gelmini who invents a "neutrino tunnel" from L'Aquila to Switzerland and Fedeli, who declined "good school" if transgender is inculcated; or of Azzolina who suffocated the school of autonomy.

It is legitimate to evaluate students with quizzes that transform the battle of Actium into the "battle of Anzio" or that parents attack teachers without being reported: only Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria invest less in education than we do, with 80% of non-standard institutes on safety and the lowest compulsory education in Europe, the focus is on scientific high school at 4 years old and without Latin. With a third of non-specialized support teachers and a Miur that denies the data on burnout and contra legem it does not do prevention.

So let's put things in order: wise teachers and professors rebuild the school because there is no more time for the new generations.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/per-una-nuova-classe-dirigente-colta-ce-bisogno-di-riformare-la-scuola/ on Tue, 03 Jan 2023 07:34:23 +0000.