"Democratic School Alphabet”, edited by Christian Raimo, published in October 2024 by the publishing house The third, is a book for those who are unfamiliar with the debate on school in Italy, and for those who want to begin to understand what we are talking about when we talk about school. The book opens with the memory of the passing of Tullio De Mauro, the last minister to have been called "minister of Public education”. Since 2001, the ministry has in fact lost the adjective “public”. This is perhaps the criticism Raimo has leveled at the Italian school system today, that it is no longer public, that it no longer belongs to everyone. The volume was presented on November 25 at the Laterza publishing house, by Raimo and Andrea Gavosto, an expert in educational policies, director of the “Agnelli” foundation and author of “La scuola Blocco”, for the same publisher.
School: a system that reproduces inequalities
“Democratic School Alphabet” is a photograph of a school that doesn't work. Raimo describes institutions transformed into purely operational machines, who carry out practices and apply procedures. It is a school without spaces for dialogue, which the author misses. The very structure of the book intends to reproduce the chaotic sensation of a debate: 17 essays written by intellectuals, teachers, professors, pedagogists, educators, who inhabit the school, arranged in no particular order. There is no single common thread in the work, but there is a common consensus on the underlying problem of the Italian school, the fact that, instead of being an opportunity for social mobility, it reproduces the starting socioeconomic inequalities.
Every three years the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, promotes the Pisa program – Programme for International Student Assessment – which measures the scholastic skills of fifteen-year-olds in member countries. The latest Pisa survey shows that theItaly It is a country with a low percentage of resilient students, that is, kids who, despite coming from disadvantaged backgrounds, manage to achieve good academic results. Raimo defines the Italian school as the "reproduction of a system of domination and power". Schools keep social hierarchies intact and do not shake up pre-existing allocations of power. They are unable to provide the most vulnerable students with the tools they need to feel capable and powerful in a world that, for them, already seems to have a sealed destiny. In 2022, the Ministry of Education changed its name to the Ministry of Education and Merit. But what merit can there be in student assessments and commitment if they do not start from the same starting blocks?
Making School Work: More Training and Inclusiveness
A school that leaves the most fragile behind concerns us all. During the presentation of Raimo's book, Gavosto underlined how a country without adequate human capital developed mainly through education struggles to grow. It is no coincidence that Italy is among the last OECD countries in terms of social mobility, which measures an individual's ability to improve their economic and social status compared to their family's starting position. But to return to its function as a social elevator, school must work. The book proposes numerous practices and solutions for a more democratic school, and during the debate that followed its presentation, further ideas emerged.
A first issue concerns the need to provide adequate training to teachers. Today, training is mainly disciplinary, focusing a lot on content and little on educational method. Teachers should be prepared to respond to the plurality of students' needs, not just to transmit notions.
We cannot talk about a school that works without addressing the issue of inclusion. The problems of inclusivity are many and range from the poor accessibility of the institutes, in terms of buildings, to the lack of support teachers, to the still too numerous ghetto classes. According to Gavosto, in Italy there are only 218.000 support teachers, and 65.000 of them do not have any specific training. Furthermore, 40% of Italian schools are still characterized by the reality of ghetto classes, in which students from disadvantaged social backgrounds are isolated from the rest of the school. These classes contribute to the fragmentation of our educational system.
The book “Alphabet of a Democratic School” is a good starting point to begin to unravel the tangle of the complicated debate that revolves around the school. Education is talked about everywhere, but perhaps the only place where it is not discussed is the school itself. The reality is that reforms overlap, measures are endured and the school struggles to free itself from the feeling of being a "tribunal" that applies rules without ever being questioned. Raimo tells the story of a school that tries to react, and to build an ambitious educational project, truly inclusive and functional for everyone.
