The school, the merit and the nonsense of the students enlisted
Is it really the competition, the run-up to the vote, the scholarship, the commitment to pass the selections, the meritocratic worry of the family and social environment that haunts the school? Giuliano Cazzola's comment
The remnants of what was once the "student movement" emerge in disarray and hopelessness from the occupied classrooms with proud confidence. That's right today university students "make a visit", claiming psychiatric help (remember Linus' psychiatric help?).
The enemy is no longer capitalism, the authoritarian school, the exploitation of labor ("Students, workers! United in the struggle!") and the class school ("Do you know, Countess, what a dear relative of occupation told me , that that rabble locked up in there made a profession of free love. After all, my dear, what are you surprised about? When the worker wants his son to be a doctor, imagine the environment that comes out of it, there is no more moral Countess!). It was "Contessa" the song of the days of struggle (moreover its author ended up working with Silvio Berlusconi: pecunia non olet); today students don't even know it.
The interventions of their representatives, on the occasion of the inaugurations of the academic years (often in the presence of the Head of State, always of the minister Anna Maria Bernini) are a lugubrious whining about the stress that students suffer… in studying. The triggering cause – which according to them can lead to suicide – is the competition, the run-up to the vote, the scholarship, the commitment to pass the selections, the meritocratic worry of the family and social environment. In recent years, the "new line" was tested by two female students in Pisa (if I remember correctly); .the circumstance was signaled as unusual and curious news. This year all the male and female students who took part in the inaugurations of the academic years played the same music and used the same tones. And – on va sans dire – they have attracted the attention of the media, to the point of being called in almost all the talks to expose the sad condition of the male and female student.
Emma Ruzzon opened the dance, who had already made herself recognized in her speech at the inauguration of last year's academic year in the presence of President Sergio Mattarella. On that occasion he had accused Italy of not being a free country, because the Senate had not approved the Zan bill ; moreover, the opposing senators had even dared to applaud its sinking. No one had taught her that it is instead an expression of freedom to exercise one's dissent against the truths that are imposed in defiance of every principle of natural law which cannot be misled by positive law. This year. Ruzzon, in front of the minister Anna Maria Bernini, evoked a new massacre of the innocents (the students, in fact) who would be victims, up to suicide, of the competitive logic: "We are tired of mourning our peers – said the president of the council of students – and we want all the political forces present to make themselves available to understand, together with us, how to take action to respond to this emergency, but we need the courage to question the entire merit-centric and competitive system“. All this after placing the laurel wreath on the lectern. “The laurel wreath – he explained – must not mean excellence, unbridled competition. It must be a symbol of the completion of a path that is personal, of liberation through knowledge. We have chosen to show it here with a green bow, that of psychological well-being, for all those people who will not be able to wear it, for all the people who have been or are feeling bad about reaching this crown. Being sick doesn't have to be normal." This performance, as well as invitations to talk shows, earned her a place of honor at the 19th Congress of the CGIL, where she represented the discomfort of students paired with a young engineer who complained of precariousness.
But the climax, at least for now, was held on April 4 at the inauguration of the 632nd academic year of the University of Ferrara, also present here, the Head of State and the minister, who, out of politeness, when he takes the word to the president of the student council, they avoid saying: "Thank you, we have already given". Alessandra De Fazio said: “I am a failure, I don't deserve to live. These are not the words that headline yet another newspaper that reports daily, alongside the deaths of our classmates, the exaltation of a student who recognizes sleep as an obstacle to graduating in half the time. These words came from the same mouth of the person who is in front of you today, my mother had to hear and endure these words when immediately after the medical test I realized that I hadn't made it, for the second time". Then continued: "What an exaggeration for a test that can be retaken the following year – continued the student – but how can we think that a university path should be dictated by our times while we are constantly bombarded by the myth of performativity and by a competition illogical that slams the success of others in our faces and makes us breathe a sigh of relief when someone fails in our place". And he added again in a brass crescendo: “Quoting Alessandro Barbero, in other times they believed in witches, we believe in meritocracy. It is trivially thought that merit can be a fair criterion, a substitute for the old privilege, from which instead it has inherited all the gap and disparity. Scholarships are blackmail. If we all have the same right, why should someone be forced to hold tighter times just because they are poorer? The university system is classist. It is an institution that ignores our humanity by submitting to the blackmail of the market (we lacked the market! Ed). Universities promote the illusions of guaranteeing us equal tools”. “We are given the opportunity to redeem ourselves from our condition of poverty, as if it were a fault, provided we demonstrate that we are deserving, achieving excellent results within measured and limited time periods. Female and male students are not the means to support training, the right to study must reside in collective emancipation and must be an integral and inseparable part of public social welfare, free and guaranteed by the State for all".
And article 34 of the Constitution (Those capable and deserving, even if without means, have the right to reach the highest levels of studies) where do we put it? Alessandra De Fazio did not even pose the problem: "We ask – she said again in an oratorical riot – that our country considers the psychological well-being as a fundamental right of the individual, on a par with physical health, both with the introduction of the psychologist of basis, but also with a systemic reform that deconstructs the meritocratic pillars. We are no longer willing – concluded Alessandra – to accept a sense of inadequacy, depression and even suicides due to the conditions imposed by a sick system that barters the person for performance. We don't have to deserve to study, to have a home and care”.
How dared this government to add the word "merit" even to the name of the ministry?
But basically the students and their representatives have some reason.
They automatically get to the diploma without failures, repair exams, end-of-course and high school exams. They have been carrying serious gaps since primary school (pay attention to how today's young people write: when it's good they only use block letters, while the language is that of text messages). Try to assign a thesis to a university student and first of all you will have to correct – pace Fabio Rampelli – the use of Italian. The high school graduation exam was the hardest in life; now it is a test that is passed with Bulgarian quotas of promoted, on a par with the votes taken at the congress by Maurizio Landini.
At the University the gaps all add up and maybe – exam after exam (almost always done with quizzes as if it were a theory test for a driving license) – there is that minimum of selection always postponed in previous courses of study. Eventually, graduation comes. Then it happens that graduates have to take the qualifying exams several times for the professions that require it. There was a case when none of the candidates passed the exam to enter the judiciary. At this level the passages become more selective.
Then you try to enter the job market. And here the donkey falls, because in addition to a degree, companies ask for an indispensable minimum of professional knowledge that has not been acquired. Then begins the telenovela of precariousness, because there comes a moment in life when it becomes difficult to "deconstruct the meritocratic pillars".
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/la-scuola-il-merito-e-le-fesserie-degli-studenti-intruppati/ on Sun, 09 Apr 2023 08:06:53 +0000.