Manifesto per la nuova scuola* *tra i firmatari Alessandro Barbero, Mauro Boarelli, Luciano Canfora, Mario Capasso, Ivano Dionigi, Chiara Frugoni, Carlo Ginzburg, Francesco Guccini, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, Vito Mancuso, Dacia Maraini, Ana Millan Gasca

1) The school as a place of human relationships and intergenerational connection

The school deals with people who are growing, not with abstract entities that can be broken down and reduced to a series of “skills.” Teaching and learning in fact touch all dimensions of the human being – intellectual, rational, affective, emotional, relational, physical – which are interconnected and inseparable; it must always be remembered, in this sense, that the relationship between teachers and students is first and foremost a human relationship.

The idea that school can be centered on the simple acquisition of “skills” is profoundly mistaken, both because it applies to the school environment categories born in a completely different context, that of business and work productivity, and because it excludes the fully human dimension, which is central in school and in the long and non-linear processes of learning and growth.

2) For a school of knowledge

To fulfill the task entrusted to it by the Constitution, the public school must be centered on knowledge, learning, and respect for the psycho-physical needs of growth of the very young. Only through engagement with cultural content, its development and acquisition – starting from a thorough and real literacy – can students become free and aware citizens, able to contribute to genuine progress in society. Without the education of new generations, democracy itself is emptied of substance.

3) A proper relationship between means and ends

If it is true that school must be founded on knowledge and learning, all teaching tools and methods, including those related to the use of digital technologies, must remain or return to being simple means, to be used not regardless but if and when the needs of sharing cultural content (which is a continuous activity of intelligence, actualization, and critical reworking of knowledge guided by the teacher) require it. In other words, the harmful reversals and frequent inversions of priorities between means and ends that have characterized the “didactic jargon” of recent decades must be avoided – to the point that some seem to think that the means themselves are the content of teaching – and the proper place must be restored to the freedom of teaching (often crushed and stifled by the imposition of trends of very little didactic and cultural value), in the name of education that is as rich and plural as possible and of the educational responsibility of teachers. It must be remembered that teachers are intellectuals and professionals, whose task is not to bureaucratically and passively apply decisions made elsewhere, but to find from time to time the most suitable means for teaching. On the other hand, it is unclear how a teacher reduced to a bureaucrat and certifier could help students acquire an indispensable critical sense in the face of reality and the cultural content they gradually appropriate.

In any reasoning about means, it should not be forgotten how the increasingly pervasive use of digital technology – which the use of “distance learning” has made predominant even at school, to the detriment of every didactic and educational need that required different tools – is linked to hyperconnection disorders that affect the very young, to the risks of social withdrawal, to a sense of insecurity, to dependence on technological tools, even to panic attacks, phenomena that also arise as a result of the lack of relationships that can only be experienced in person and the denial of the physical-corporeal dimension, whose involvement is fundamental for people who are growing. In this context, it should always be remembered that relationships, words, gestures, and everything that passes in verbal and non-verbal communication are the very first tools of teachers, the only truly indispensable ones.

4) The lack of involvement of teachers in the “reforms” of the last twenty years

Since public school has as its purpose the education and human and cultural formation of people who are growing, political decision-makers, before hypothesizing any “reform,” should engage with experts in cultural transmission and those in developmental age – teachers, psychoanalysts, intellectuals, educators – and not with representatives of private associations – Fondazione Agnelli, Treelle, Anp – who represent and pursue private interests.

5) The recruitment and training of teachers

 The training and recruitment of teachers must focus on cultural preparation, in-depth and first-hand knowledge of disciplinary content – only genuine experts can transmit to students the passion for learning and for individual subjects – motivation and inclination for teaching, for cultural sharing and for relationships with people who are growing. As for the relational aspect, teachers must be able to have discussions with experts in developmental age with proven experience and high professionalism, also through the tool of psychological counseling and dedicated groups, to examine the dynamics on which the educational relationship is based and to be able to resolve, where necessary, any relational knots.

6) Restoring centrality to the lesson hour

Authoritative political figures have asked that learning not acquired in “distance learning” be recovered through an extension of the school year. This proposal, unfortunately, appears to be nothing more than a demagogic stunt: anyone who knows the world of school and the dynamics of teaching/learning – and does not think they consist of a quick coating of “skills” – knows very well that in two or three weeks, at the end of a terrible period, it is not possible to recover anything that was lost in a year without in-person school. After twenty years of devastating “reforms,” what is needed instead are precise and profound interventions, to relaunch the function of the school, and that is, first of all, to restore centrality to the disciplinary lesson hour, an hour that has been disqualified and marginalized by a series of activities that distort its function and make it a residual activity. If we really want to recover lost time, we must eliminate what is not learning and teaching:

– away with the useless “school-work alternation” paths (now PCTO), to be replaced, if anything, with sensible and non-mandatory internships, if and when worthwhile, outside school hours and by decision of the class councils;

– away with INVALSI tests, which take away weeks of time from school activities without ever clarifying their meaning, function, and usefulness: return INVALSI to a purely statistical function on the progress of Italian schools;

– dismantling of the INDIRE machine, which imposes its hegemony on teaching methodologies and “innovation” through teacher training and recruitment, in contempt of the constitutional principle of freedom of teaching;

– away with non-essential projects (with the exception, for example, of linguistic and cultural mediation for foreign students and psychological counseling, activities that should be strengthened, made structural, and entrusted to serious professionals through national registers and not to the randomness of improvised projects), which only serve to fuel absurd competition between schools, making us forget for decades that the only real, useful, indispensable project that the school offers is the lesson hour. The perspective must be reversed: it is not the school that is a project factory by default, but rather that particularly valid individual projects can be accepted by a school that basically does something else;

– away with the RAV, hypertrophic and standardized programming, and all those documents in which the abstract and bureaucratic description of teaching takes the place of teaching itself, in a continuous and paradoxical certification of nothingness;

– away with convoluted PTOFs that use alleged “territorial” needs as a pretext. What any public school really offers is the teaching of Italian, mathematics, languages, sciences, arts, technologies, literature, history, geography, history of ideas, law, self-knowledge and knowledge of one's own body also through physical activity and school socialization…isn't that enough? Those who say it is not enough actually want to get rid of what is truly valuable that the school offers;

– in short, away with all the useless bureaucratic activities that take time, attention, and energy away from teachers, who must urgently devote themselves to teaching. For this revolution to be possible, however, it is necessary to:

7) Review the entire failed structure of “school autonomy”

“School autonomy,” introduced during Minister Berlinguer’s tenure, has for over twenty years transformed the national public school – a “constitutional organ of democracy,” in Calamandrei’s words – into a series of quasi-companies in absurd competition with each other for clientele, into useless project factories, into centers of power and bureaucratic proliferation for its own sake, in which the ambiguous figure of the manager-principal almost inevitably subordinates the didactic and educational purposes of the school, the only ones that make it exist and give it meaning, to bureaucratic-management and administrative needs. It is therefore essential to restore to the school the public, democratic, and national horizon that is its own, so that no external purpose can interfere with the only activity the school is called to perform, that is, to educate and instruct.

8) A different numerical ratio between students and teachers

Finally, it is necessary to do what everyone announces and no one implements: significantly reduce the number of students per class, so that teachers can really devote time and attention to the needs of each student, an operation now more feasible thanks to the planned European funding. The paradox must end whereby teachers are asked to implement personalized teaching – a request that actually results in bureaucratic proliferation and the demand for all kinds of “certifications” – and at the same time are prevented from doing so, being forced to work in overcrowded classes with up to thirty/thirty-five students. It is no coincidence that the number of participants in a discussion group, according to group psychology, should be limited to a maximum of fifteen, otherwise aggregation and functioning of the group itself become impossible; for the school, it must at least be reiterated that under no circumstances should classes be formed with more than twenty students.

There is also a need to immediately dismantle what, at best, can be considered a naive illusion, namely the idea that digital tools allow teachers to follow an even greater number of students, perhaps through the production of videos to be shown in asynchronous lessons. The exact opposite is true: “distance learning,” largely ineffective with people who are growing, since for children and adolescents there is no learning that does not pass through relationships and continuous verbal and non-verbal feedback, would actually require a one-to-one ratio between students and teachers, in order to have even the slightest validity.