The working group set up by Minister Valditara for Authoritativeness and Respect will meet shortly at the Ministry of Education and Merit, which will have to “develop measures to enhance the authoritativeness of teachers, guarantee respect for them, companions and public goods on the part of the students”, working in particular on relaunching the educational alliance between school, families and students.
Valditara involved a heterogeneous group of figures inside and outside the school world, including Marco Campione (consultant to the minister and formerly in the ministry in the technical secretariat of the minister Fedeli and head secretariat of the undersecretary Faraone), Elena Ugolini (rector of the Malpighi high school in Bologna , former undersecretary of the ministry of education in the Monti Government with the minister Francesco Profumo), the psychiatrist Raffaele Morelli (known face of the TV and director of the Riza Institute), Simonetta Matone (formerly deputy prosecutor of the Juvenile Court of Rome and today in Parliament for the League), the doctor Vittorio Lodolo Doria (expert in the pathology of burnout which predominantly affects teachers), university professors (from law to psychology) and school administrators, together with members of the school administration.
One of the many commissions crowding the corridors of the Viale Trastevere building or a working group with a delicate and strategic assignment? The answer can probably be obtained from what Valditara declared in the interview with Tuttoscuola in the December issue: “The priority emergency is the one that risks blowing up the very existence of an educational system, or rather the loss of that authority and that respect that in every evolved and prosperous society characterize the relationship between teacher and students”.
We do not know on which orientations the working group will move.
A relaxing message – in our opinion – could place the accent on the promotion of an education to aware and responsible citizenship, which should be cultivated as a preventive action in an educational sense by the school.
In this sense, there are interesting experiences that focus not only on learning through study, but also on the stimulus to put into practice responsible behavior on the part of students. And this through engaging and proactive pedagogical proposals, focused on the protagonism of students within a teaching strategy guided by the school, implemented in collaboration with other social actors (voluntary associations, day centers for people with disabilities, firefighters, museums, etc etc): they can represent effective prevention tools and at the same time address a just instance of accountability in a non-punitive but always formative key.
A richness that exists and that it can be worthwhile to encourage and raise to a widespread practice, in the first place precisely to promote prevention among all students, and then to gather good solutions to attempt a recovery for full-blown cases. With a precise line of work: enhancing and supporting the work that schools can do.
Given that authority must first of all be earned and recognized, FrIt could be appropriate to invest in teacher training, provide for structural figures in the school staff, for example psychologists and educators, encourage the construction of community networks and pathways, abandon the logic of the program to enter a more complex dimension of national guidelines, which, they recite verbatim: “The goals of the school must be defined starting from the person who learns, with the originality of his individual path and the openings offered by the network of relationships that link him to the family and to the social spheres. The definition and implementation of educational and teaching strategies must always take into account the uniqueness and complexity of each person, their articulated identity, their aspirations, abilities and weaknesses, in the various stages of development and training. The student is placed at the center of the educational action in all its aspects: cognitive, affective, relational, bodily, aesthetic, ethical, spiritual, religious. In this perspective, teachers will have to think and implement their educational and teaching projects not for abstract individuals, but for people who live here and now, who raise precise existential questions, who go in search of horizons of meaning”.
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At work at MiM the Group of ‘Authority and Respect’ – Tuttoscuola