Italian schools: the false dilemma of 4+2
It is not time that needs cutting, but the emptiness within it
The debate on Italian schools has once again been squeezed into an all-too-convenient frame: five years against four, tradition against modernity, academic schooling against work. The perfect way to avoid the real point. The problem with school is not the length of the course, but what remains in a student’s head when it ends.
The 4+2 technological and vocational pathway [four years of upper-secondary study followed by two of higher technical training] could be an intelligent reform or the country’s latest exercise in changing everything so that nothing changes: altering duration, acronyms, architecture and language while leaving the substance untouched. If it means four serious years, two years at an ITS Academy [a higher technological institute], real laboratories, selected employers, well-prepared teachers and measurable destinations, it could restore dignity to technical education. If instead it merely becomes a shortcut to channel more vulnerable pupils earlier onto a lesser track, it will be modernity as façade: a new container for the old emptiness.
The figures show the problem is not imaginary. Explicit school dropout has fallen, and that is positive. But implicit dropout remains serious: students who stay at school, obtain a diploma, yet do not truly command Italian, mathematics, method or reasoning. This is where the country should tremble. Because a school that retains bodies but does not educate minds is not forming citizens: it is handing out receipts.
Real reform should begin with a brutal question: what should a young person be able to do at sixteen, eighteen, twenty? Write a clear page. Understand a complex text. Construct an argument. Use numbers without fear. Know enough history not to be manipulated by the first digital preacher. Speak decent English. Master technology rather than be at its mercy. A few things, but known to the bone.
Solutions exist and need no proclamations. First: a leaner national curriculum, more demanding on fundamental skills. Second: annual assessments used not to produce league tables, but to intervene immediately where students are falling behind. Third: a special plan for institutions where schooling is in retreat: more useful time, serious tutoring and public scrutiny of results. Not to stigmatise those schools, but to stop postcodes continuing to determine a child’s destiny. Fourth: a serious career for teachers. You cannot ask a teacher to save the republic while treating him as a weary functionary.
Finally, technical education must be taken out of its cultural ghetto. It must not be the school for those who ‘cannot manage’, but the noble route for those learning a skilled, useful, precise, modern trade. Germany and Switzerland understood long ago: skilled work and culture are not enemies.
Italian schools need not choose between knowledge and craft. They must demand both. But to do so they must stop changing the sign above the door without checking that real teaching goes on inside.