The Wedge

Your children are drowning. There is no time to lose. How good is your plan? How strong is your rope? You must do everything in your power to save them.

This is education in the neoliberal age: a quest not for success, but for survival. You ask what it is that will give your children ‘a better chance’. You find a dispassionately technocratic answer, based on the rigorous analysis of academic achievement data. You discount every factor that might make your children non-average, beginning with their attitudes and desires. While you’re at it, you put out of your mind the very idea of social relationships and of the social good. Remember: your children are drowning. It would be quite absurd at this time to wonder what your friends’ children, what their own friends are up to.

It is a perfectly smooth, well-oiled capture mechanism: a topic that families obsess about, carefully wrapped in a foil of middle-class insecurity. If Auckland’s Metro were a conservative magazine, it would just get on with telling you what the best schools are – that is to say, the most exclusive ones – and intimate that you would be a fool, or a person whose priorities are criminally flawed, not to send your children there (not that you’d need to be told). But this is a liberal publication, and so it must proceed with circumspection, and make some convoluted noises about the socio-economic realities that counsel against judging schools solely on the basis of academic achievement before doing it anyway. Therefore editor Simon Wilson proceeds to write a story designed to make you feel like you’re not crass enough to look at a league table of schools, for you know better and are a better person than that, and then produce a league table of schools, as if such a document could be compiled, purchased and read without actively participating in the system that perpetuates inequity.

The master trick employed by Wilson and Catherine McGregor, who assembled the data, is to introduce a ‘relative score’ in order to adjust results by decile group, and give schools that operate in poorer socio-economic areas a fighting chance. So much of a fighting chance, in fact, that the single school that comes up on top of most of Metro’s tables is a decile-1 establishment, McAuley High School, by virtue of how much it outperforms schools of comparative decile. Once you’ve bought this part of the argument, which the author does a consummate job of selling, you can safely proceed to ignore the relative score column and get on with the business of comparing the raw pass marks of the schools, which is the whole purpose of the exercise. After all, why would you care that a school that works with disadvantaged kids outperforms another school that works with disadvantaged kids? Your job is to give your children a better chance, not make them relatively better off than a bunch of children whose chances aren’t very good.

However the relative score isn’t just a liberal’s conscience-stroking device (although by God it is that). It serves also to extend the logic of competition to low-decile schools, thereby making it universal. Wilson is masterful here: he introduces with an affectation of ill-concealed contempt the fierce rivalries that consume the most prestigious schools – King’s College versus Auckland Grammar, the richest private school versus the state school with true elite status – as a key to the peculiar psychology of the popular middle-class obsession with school choice (which he has the gall to chide: ‘why do we worry so much? We know most kids go to their local state school and do just fine’), and then extends it to the communities that don’t share this obsession, no doubt in part because they don’t have the luxury of choice. How many working-class families would you say are likely to be able to afford (or be allowed) to send the children out of zone, let alone to a private school? What use would this information be to them?

But a subtler yet equally important point is this: that by this stage, even as you read this blog post, you might have unwittingly, reflexively accepted as factual the proposition that McAuley High School is a better school than the other schools in its decile grouping. And if you have, then you have also agreed just as tacitly that academic achievement – being the only meter employed – is the sole determinant of the quality of a school.

The unequivocal claims made by the magazine’s cover notwithstanding (THE BEST SCHOOLS… AND THE WORST!), this is a proposition that the author, determined to have it every which way, both supports and rejects, suggesting at one point that there are in fact as many as five indicators of how good a school is. These are as follows: across the board academic achievement, top academic achievement, values, safety, and breadth and depth of opportunity. However the tables refer only to the measurable achievement criteria, so the remaining criteria are totally irrelevant to the 'unique information' that Metro is selling. ‘Values’ don’t fit in the table. ‘Breadth of opportunity’ doesn’t fit in the table. The above-average results among Māori and Pasifika students reported by some of the schools in the survey don’t fit either, and so the fulfilment of one of the core objectives of our national education framework is liquidated with a condescending nod (‘good on them’). But what is missing even more glaringly are ‘special needs [sic] and/or refugee students or others in “Alternative Education”’. All of these kids are literally a footnote in Metro’s tables, a footnote that simply states that they are not included in the calculations. And, not being included in the calculations, they disappear. In fact Simon Wilson doesn't see fit to use the word ‘inclusion’ in his ten-page story, not even as a vague, generic value to tick off a list of pious concerns. Not once.

These children don’t matter. If you’re a parent of one of these children, you don’t matter. If your school does great work with some of these children, it doesn’t matter.

Your children are drowning, and what are you going to do about it? I wrote last month that the current wave of attacks against public education in countries such as New Zealand operate by driving a wedge between the aspirations of the middle class and the realities faced by the working class. Well, this is it. The wedge. Look at the perfect, smiling, non-drowning children in the ads for private schools that accompany Metro’s league tables, and that I've included in the post. Who wouldn’t want their children to be like them? And so a story that, at the peak of its disingenuousness, set out to critique the proposition that ‘we are failing our kids if we don’t send them to a private school’, turns out to be about the privatisation of the very idea of education. By the end of it, public education has ceased to exist simply in that there is no longer a public. Just endlessly mobile individuals, their able-minded children and their freely-made choices.

It’s hard to tell if this idea is a product that is being sold to us, or if instead we are the product that Metro is selling to its eager advertisers. Most likely both. But since politics nowadays is a secondary product of marketing, it is also important to correctly interpret Metro's cover and the story's paid advertisements as vehicles of political content aimed at the liberal consumer/voter for the purposes of promoting wider acceptance of school league tables. Private schools and corporate commercial media produce these messages in the normal course of business; our liberal politicians may be a little more conflicted, but having espoused every other aspect of free-market ideology will be under considerable pressure to relent, as they have in the UK, the US and Australia. This is a battle that I don’t expect progressives to win. It is all but lost already. But cling to public education as an idea and as a institution we must, and protect what we can. Otherwise we might as well go ahead and close down the schools.

Un-Educated

John Roughan says you’d need a certificate in education to know why school league tables are a bad thing. And because he doesn’t have a certificate in education, he can but wonder what could be possibly be wrong with creating ‘winners and losers’ and introducing open, transparent competition between state schools.

An entire worldview is compressed in that single statement. Not just a political position, but an ideological one as well, a whole approach to understanding society and its institutions. That is often the case with statements about education, seeing as schools are a model of society, and the student a model of the citizen. But in the area of education there is a peculiar view that still prevails, according to which these models should be better than the societies that we have, better than the idea of citizenship that we have settled for. Those who hold this view maintain that the task of schools – and most especially of public schools – is not just to produce employable workers, but also well-rounded and socially responsible persons; and not just to help the smartest or most advantaged children to reach their full potential, but to strive to teach everyone to a comparable standard according to their need and capacity. This is not the only view of public education, as Mr Roughan’s column sharply reminds us, and we may wish to test it against the history of this great liberal and later socialist institution. However it is in this domain that ideas about social equity that have largely disappeared from the public discourse remain the strongest. Therefore the public school as an idea and in practice is one of the few grounds in which it is still possible to not only defend but also strengthen and extend those oppositional models.

The Kauri Timber Company Ltd: School seats, school desk and gates [1906]

Which is why retooling public education is one of the priorities of neoliberalism. The setback that the conservative New Zealand government suffered last week – prompting the vehement reaction of our principal newspaper’s assistant editor – is a minor one, insofar as reducing teacher numbers to invest in teacher training is a small stop if not a detour in the journey towards league tables, performance pay and the latest incarnation of school vouchers that goes under the name of charter schools. The episode however is instructive, for what prompted the backlash was the comprehensive nature of the proposal. The prospect of lower teacher numbers across the board recomposed for a brief but intense political moment the image of the national school, and united teacher unions, education sector organizations, school trustees, families and the broader public in their opposition. The result was a dramatic illustration of how loudly the people can speak when it speaks with one voice. The government abandoned its proposal in the space of less than two weeks. Some say they took too long.

We aren’t always going to be so lucky. Attacks against public education, here and elsewhere, are going to continue, and they will be launched – against the backdrop of a permanent state of economic crisis – by driving a wedge between the aspirations of the middle class and the realities faced by the working class. Of course league tables and performance pay are damaging to public education understood as a universal good – and I’m going to explain why to John Roughan in a minute – but so long as you feel confident that you will be able to move to the area with the best school, and you have been correctly conditioned to view the education of your children as a form of competition, you might not mind this, or even learn to actively support the idea. And just in case you might harbour some nostalgia for old-fashioned egalitarian myths, we shall disguise the reforms as pious concern for the one in five whom the education system currently fails (never mind it’s more like one in twenty), and who hail in the main from the lower socio-economic classes. This will sway some of the liberals who most need to be made to feel altruistic in exchange for their class interests being served.

Teachers' Training College, Wellesley Street, Auckland [between 1907-1925]

In reality the political objective behind the introduction of national standards, league tables and performance pay is to increase the flow of public funds towards the education of the elites by creating further incentives for the teachers and schools who cater to the most privileged students. I say further because in most countries these incentives already exist, either implicitly or explicitly. In New Zealand under the Clark government there was a significant improvement in the funding mechanisms for low-decile schools, but not in the important and growing area of special needs (and special needs, as we know, tend to concentrate in low-decile communities). I wrote before about the enormous difficulties we had in accessing services and funding for our daughter and the appalling and discriminatory competition model that regulates these provisions. I could write five more posts about the way that schools that take on students like her are punished for it, but will link to this ongoing case instead. This is Labour’s legacy. One term of the current Tory government later, schools are required to report against national standards the results of students classed as having high needs – in spite of the fact that they are taught under an individualised educational programme – and are not allowed to disaggregate the data or report on how many of children with high needs there are on their roll. Now imagine this data being published in league tables, and the grossly unfair perceptions that it would generate. As for performance pay, imagine if not only schools – as is already the case – but also teachers were penalised financially for teaching students like our daughter. Would this lead to a more or less equitable system, would you say? I think even John Roughan could do the math on this one, if he cared to.

Yet that is exactly how the wedge will work: by rewarding the schools towards whom the system is biased and marginally increasing educational choice and teaching standards for the middle class and above, all at the cost of the most disadvantaged students and the most dedicated educators.

Pupils and staff at Te Uku Public School, 1910

In case you think that opposing these moves will simply be a matter of voting out a right-wing government, I invite you to consider that in Australia it was Labor that introduced national standards and league tables, and is now pledging to move on performance pay; while in the United States the No Child Left Behind legislation was introduced by the Republicans but Obama – who opposed it as a candidate – did nothing more than tinker with it in office and no longer intends to repeal it. As for New Zealand, while I sought and obtained reassurances last week that Labour still opposes national standards, the policies of the party most likely to form the next government are a long way from being announced and the worrying lines in David Shearer’s first speech as leader about getting rid of bad teachers still ring in the ears. This is only part of the reason why defending public education cannot be left to politicians, but it’s worth reminding ourselves of the mechanisms of consensus that we are dealing with.

As one of the nation’s leading editorialists, John Roughan is part of these mechanisms. His boisterously misinformed column is the measure of the kind of rhetoric we can expect to continue to have to face – a rhetoric that clouds the facts to the point of befuddlement, and to very precise ends: so that voters will continue to feel these issues at a gut level, and add them to the sum of their economic, social and existential insecurities, so that they may finally beg that their children be looked after, and bugger the rest.

We can, and should, expect more. We can, and must, demand more. So get informed, join the marches and the public meetings, support teacher unions and sector organizations. Let’s not let the artful mediocrity of the likes of John Roughan write the next chapter of this story.

I happen to be a school trustee so the usually implicit disclaimer that the views expressed in this blog are mine and mine alone should be made explicit this week.

For a point by point response to John Roughan’s column and useful considerations on the state of education debate I heartily recommend this post by Russell Brown.

The lively discussion following last week’s post included a separate (and excellent) response by IlllllllllllllI, who wrote an actual an essay on criticism.

Last week I had an essay on the internet as a technology of control published in the new issues of The New Inquiry magazine, which you really ought to subscribe to. It’s only $2 a month in its electronic form (PDF or iPad).

Lastly, I wrote my Euro 2012 preview for my hungry fortnightly slot at Overland but the football blog Minus the Shooting is back and I’ll strive to contribute to that as well. Should be great anyway. Bookmark it or do whatever it is that you do.

Full Image credits are as follows:
1. The Kauri Timber Company Ltd (Auckland Office): School seats, school desk [and] gates. [Catalogue page. ca 1906]. The Kauri Timber Company Ltd (Auckland Office): [Catalogue. ca 1906]. Ref: Eph-B-BUILDING-SUPPLIES-ca-1906-01-42. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
2. Teachers' Training College, Wellesley Street, Auckland. Price, William Archer, 1866-1948: Collection of post card negatives. Ref: 1/2-000538-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
3. Gilmour Brothers (Firm). Pupils and staff at Te Uku Public School, 1910 - Photograph taken by Gilmour Brothers. Price, William Archer, 1866-1948: Collection of post card negatives. Ref: 1/2-001089-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

Shadow Children

Gravemente insufficiente. Critically inadequate. That was my mark in English as well as other topics at the end of the first and second year of intermediate school.

When you have a number of fail marks the teachers have a meeting to decide whether you should be granted an overall pass mark or be forced to repeat the year. Pupils who are subjected to this drastic measure are said to have been bocciati (bowled) or respinti (repelled), and oh how I’d like to know the history of those two words, which might originally have been intended as euphemisms but are anything but: bowled, like a pin standing alongside other pins, with no capacity to get out of the way, hoping that the giant ball will spare you and hit somebody else; or repelled, like medieval soldiers laying siege to the citadel of knowledge - and being driven back with heavy casualties.

I was spared this gruesome fate, and in the second year this came to my family I suspect as a genuine surprise. Yet I can’t honestly remember how I felt about it. I know I hated school intensely, but I couldn’t say if the prospect of catastrophic failure was any more terrifying than progress, for either way there was no meaningful end in sight. The alternative to school was never not-school, at least for a stretch of five or six more years, and I doubt I could see much further ahead than a week or a month in those days.

Looking back, I’m pretty sure I suffered from depression. It’s not just what I remember of that time - the desperate sadness, and those spiralling thought processes that I call to mind with apprehension even now - but also that I don’t remember so much of it: most of my classmates, most of my teachers, what the inside of the school even looked like. Seeing as I recall my time at primary school and high school quite well, I can only associate that blank interlude in my autobiographical memory with some sort of psychological trauma. But you know what kids that age are like, right? They are such difficult years. And I suspect it was left at that by everyone involved, seeing as there was no concrete, visible trauma that one could point to, and that they all hoped that I eventually would snap out of it, in the same mysterious way that I had snapped into it.

Meanwhile, school was prepared to let me progress to the third year and as far as the final state exams in spite of my critical inadequacies, but not to investigate their underlying reasons or pause even for a second to consider whether it, the school, might have a less than positive influence on young people who exhibited my particular symptoms. To wit: the truancy, the apathy, the lack of aptitude in most disciplines and - equally as unexplained, equally as suspect - how I still seemed to do very well in Italian and in written composition. It was that one talent that counselled against an outright bocciatura - my teacher of Italian and History, it was whispered to me, had fought like a tiger on my behalf - but I’d still have to come right eventually in order to pass the final exams.

And come right I did. I don’t have any memory of how this happened either, I just know that the fog lifts midway through that final year and I remember studying for the exams, doing well once again like I used to. Maths and English became things I could make sense of, whereas in other topics it was simply a matter of putting in the work, and spending some time in class. As quickly as I lost it, that compliance that I had interiorised so well at primary school came back. Outrageously, I passed the exams with distinction and that is the only permanent record left of my wretched time at intermediate school, so that you could be excused to think that I had been a model student throughout. Thus the institution colludes with my amnesia.

One of the things that bothers me to this day is that I was likely held by somebody at the time as evidence that the system works, a troubled and poorly performing student who thanks to the patient nurturing of his teachers finally turned things around. Accordingly, my giudizio (mark or grade, yes, but literally judgment, sentence) included the recommendation to send me to a liceo so that I could eventually pursue a university degree. Some of my classmates weren’t so lucky. Their recommendation was to ‘enrol in a brief professional training course’. Brief. There’s another heavily loaded word. Please don’t leave your child at school for too long, it’s painfully clear that he or she doesn’t belong. And how many families mistook that advice for an instruction that simply had to be followed?

***

English has its own linguistic tangles too. When your teacher fails you in a subject, is it your failure or theirs? Can school itself ever ultimately fail a student? The way in which those final evaluations of ours were worded placed the burden of success or failure entirely on the student, but now in New Zealand the talk around National Standards is all about finding the schools and the educators that fail their students. A truly democratic public school system ought to produce consistent results regardless of socio-economic disparity, or so the theory goes. It’s not true of course, growing up in a family that has a history of being rewarded by the school system is a very strong predictor of educational achievement. But who are these kids who do well? And what does it mean to do well? How much of it is the result of having interiorised a discipline, and trusting - because you know it to be true, because Mum is an architect and Dad is a doctor - that educational achievement translates into wealth and a successful career?



The path chosen by our Republican institutions was not to reform the school system so that it conformed to its democratic aims and produce a broadly egalitarian system like the one we have in New Zealand. It chose rather to give the working class access to the old schools of the elites, the licei. I’m a beneficiary of this policy. At a liceo you would study Latin for five years because ‘it broadens the mind’ and not at all because the prospect of studying Latin would intimidate and thus turn away a very large number of working class 13-14 year olds whose families happened to be unfamiliar with the code, according to which ‘broadens the mind’ correctly translates as ‘it’s what you have to put yourself through in order to graduate from a liceo’. By the same token, at a liceo you would not develop any manual skill, because manual skills are what you need in menial jobs.

They were training us to be intellectuals, but the kind of intellectuals who never ask any questions. And I complied - oh, how did I comply! And I learned to fear failure again, which is just as integral to success as craving the validation of a good grade.



My original plan for this week was to write about the fourth kid from the left in this picture. His name is Michael Gove. Nowadays he’s Shadow Children’s Secretary of the British conservative party, but at the time when the picture was taken - in February 1979 - he was taking part in an ‘inter-primary school quiz at Hazlehead Primary’. I could make a snide remark about his brimming eagerness to please the questionmaster, but not two weeks ago I showed you what I myself looked like back then, and aren’t we the same boy, the same aspiring model pupil?

Earlier this month, whilst discussing his party’s plans to rewrite the national curriculum and ‘restore past methods of teaching history, English, maths and science’, Mr. Gove had this to say:

Most parents would rather their children had a traditional education, with children sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England, the great works of literature, proper mental arithmetic, algebra by the age of 11, modern foreign languages. That’s the best training of the mind and that’s how children will be able to compete.

Jake has already commented on what it means to go back to teaching a subject like history in that particular way. What interests me here is Mr. Gove’s desire to restore the school of his youth, a school that demanded much of its students and rewarded them with the ability to compete. Not with each other, you understand, for that would be unseemly, but with the rest of the world: Finland, Singapore, South Korea, the countries that he routinely touts as models of achievement in education. Yet he does not intend to emulate them or copy their systems; he just wants to go back in time. The old school worked for him, you see. Adopted at two years of age by a fish merchant and a laboratory assistant, Gove is in fact a compelling success story. And perhaps, who knows, if it hadn’t been for that blip, that black hole, those dismal two years of spectacular under-achievement, I would think that way too, hold myself up as a model: I did it, and so can you, so can everybody. You just need to put your head down and study hard and trust that you will be saved.

But I wasn’t that student, at least not the whole time. And so now I know what’s wrong with National Standards and the nostalgia for the desks lined up in rows: that they are founded on an insecurity, and that it’s an insecurity that will cripple our children. What is the ‘plain English’ requirement of the campaign for National Standards but the projection of that fear of failure? ‘Please tell me if my kid is critically inadequate, I need to know. Don’t worry about my feelings, their feelings - just give it to us straight’. And then what? How will the Māori boy of five who feels that school isn’t for him be helped by being told that that he is a failure, in plain English and from day one? How will the intellectually disabled girl react to the news? And what about the child who excels academically, for that matter? Isn’t there a danger that little Michael Gove will grow up thinking that that is what school is about: pleasing the questionmaster, doing well in tests, performing well above the standards?

None of this will improve our schools, or change our attitudes towards education. Critically, none of this will persuade the children that they need to be the ones asking the questions, instead of always supplying the answers. Then the issue of just who it is who is critically inadequate - the pupil or the school - might suddenly become a whole lot more interesting.









On the very vexed and much written about subject of National Standards, I must insist that you read this post by Jolisa Gracewood on her American experience and this one by Hilary Stace on the possible implications for autistic children.

Reading Domenico Starnone's Solo se interrogato (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1995) has helped me think far more critically than I used to about my own education. It also features on page 43 a much better discussion than mine of those horrific metaphors for when they make you repeat the year.

On the subject of Michael Gove you also need to read this piece by Philip Challinor from 2008.

My old intermediate school, Scuola Media Eugenio Colorni, is located at the corner of Via Francesco Albani and Via Paolo Uccello, Milan.

The Phoenicians

Phoenician funerary mask, 4th-5th century BC

Here’s a interesting statistic about my education. Between primary school, intermediate school and high school I studied the Phoenicians three times and the Second World War zero times. That’s because in Italy we believe in studying history in a strict chronological order, and furthermore we restart the clock of civilisation at each level. Thus in order to get to the great conflicts of the last century you need to have covered Mesopotamia and Phoenicia and the rest of the ancient world, then the Roman Empire and Visigoths and Charlemagne and the age of discoveries and Napoleon and the Risorgimento, so that by the time you get to the final year of each course of study you’re lucky to even make it to the twentieth century, let alone cover Fascism or the Holocaust. What little I happened to be told at school concerning these not insignificant topics was not part of the study of history proper, but of literature, and only at intermediate school, when we looked at authors like Primo Levi or books such as Anne Frank’s Diary or L’Agnese va a morire. I’m pretty sure we also saw a film about Mussolini starring Rod Steiger.

To this day, even though I read independently into these large chunks of neglected history, and saw other films not starring Rod Steiger, I find that when my oldest asks me about the causes of World War I mumble quite a bit, whereas I am far clearer on what caused Sparta and Athens to have regular goes at each other, or indeed the Carthaginians and the Romans.

Not that the Carthaginians, strictly speaking, are the same thing as the Phoenicians. There’s a vexed historiographical question if you’ve ever seen one instead of concentrating on your country’s recent racist past. Phoenicia, also known as Canaan, is a region where the ancient civilisation known to us as the Phoenicians established itself since the Iron Age, that is to say around 1200 BC, whereas the Carthaginians are a related but in important ways distinct civilisation that flourished much later around the city of Carthage after the Persians conquered Phoenicia proper. The confusion arises from the fact that the first city known as Carthage was founded by the Phoenicians, but it’s actually situated in modern Tunisia, and that’s where the Phoenician elites repaired after the Persian conquest (Cyrus, was it?). Then they started to wage wars on the Romans, who referred to them as Punic people, by which they meant no offence: Punic means purple and purple dyes were one of the Pheonicians’ trades. This enmity led to at least three Punic wars, one of which - was it the second? - featured the routing of the Romans at Cannae. Come to think of it, it has to have been the second war because the first one was fought in Sicily, and Cannae is in Apulia. Then I’m pretty sure the third war is the one where Cato the Elder was all 'you’ll never guess where I got these figs from' and 'delenda Carthago est' and the Romans took the war to the enemy shores and that spelt the end for the Carthaginians.

Another thing I remember without having to reach for Wikipedia is that the most notable ancient source for the claim that the Phoenicians gave the alphabet to the Greeks was Herodotus.

Fragmentary inscription on a cup found in Kition, 9th century BC

And there is nothing wrong with that. I don't begrudge my memory the space furnished with these ancient relics, nor am I completely insensitive to the argument that in order to understand modernity it is useful to know something about the pre-modern world. Certainly I like to think for instance that a selective allegiance to classical Greece can be helpful to counter the enforced Christian monoculturalism of the thing we call Europe. But so long as this is true, let us make those connections visible and concrete: let us look at the history of democracy, of revolutions, of migrations, of the city. Plodding along history as if on a train that stops at every station seems designed to do just the opposite, and to quite deliberately ensure that the ultimate destination - the present that, according to cliché, history should help us make sense of - won't be reached, or will be reached too late to be included in the final exams, which amounts to the same thing.



The irony is especially galling since every one of the schools I attended displayed a shield like the one above (from my primary), bearing the name of the school and the symbol of the Republic. That was one of the chief promises of the institutions of 1948: that education would (finally) be a right and a public good, the key to equality of opportunity regardless of socio-economic status. A free education provided by the state to all children under the age of fourteen on the basis of a national curriculum was the paramount instrument for achieving the objective under article 3 of our newly minted constitution, namely

to remove all economic and social obstacles that, by limiting the freedom and equality of citizens, prevent full individual development and the participation of all workers in the political, economic, and social organization of the country.

And yet so few of us ever even got to be told at school about that constitution or the circumstances in which it was forged. That same Republic that was the guarantor of our right to an education was wholly absent from our teachings, as was in most cases the Fascism that it repudiated. And so was the post-war world in which our parents grew up, the economic boom, terrorism, our lasting involvement in the former African colonies. The contemporary world outside our schools seldom made an appearance in our daily schedule, and outside of the study of geography - the primary products of the Sicilian economy are as follows… - it didn’t feature anywhere in our curriculum, except as a sort of afterthought: time allowing, students enrolled in the final year should study Fascism, an important national political movement starring Rod Steiger. But time seldom allowed.

So, as in matters of religion, you grew up with an idea of the country shaped by your family’s beliefs, which were also beliefs about history. This was especially true for my parents’ generation, that lived through Fascism and the transition to the Republic. In the overall context of the nation’s unbecoming, some families and social groups were far keener to forget than others, or had more pressing reasons to cling to their own mythologies: what was our involvement, how did our present (mis)fortunes come about? It is on the basis of those histories that we construct our sense of citizenship.

If it were up to me to reform the Italian education system, my founding principle would be this: that it is the foremost right of each child to be told about the present and to be given the instruments to understand it. Our national pastime of short term memory loss must finally be abandoned, the mirrors uncovered: this is what we look like, this is where we come from. For it is precisely the emptiness of these spaces that allows false histories to grow and fester: the grotesquely distorted picture of the Roman empire evoked by Mussolini, which he revived by annexing with brutal ferocity the bits of Africa that had fallen off the table at which the other colonial powers insisted to dine; or more recently, the heroic warlike lineage that the Northern secessionists trace back to Alberto da Giussano and his Lombard League, garnished by pagan rituals staged along the Po river - as if that plain had ever been one place, one country, one people. It is in that fractured history of symbols emptied of meaning that the Italian far Right constructs its myths of origin. Yet it works also because it plays on something familiar, on stories and names learned more or less by rote in the distant past of childhood and left conveniently unconnected, like my sparse knowledge of all things Phoenician; while the more concrete histories and lineages - of industrialisation, of struggle, of work - that would serve the progressive causes are never or too seldom encountered.

The education of children under Mussolini sought to inculcate absolute faith in the Party and teach its knowledge, which was the only knowledge available. The directive had been written by the Duce himself:

Italian school, in all its levels and in all its teachings, must be inspired by the ideology of Fascism, educate the Italian youth to understanding Fascism, to take pride in it and to live in the historical climate created by the Fascist revolution.

Image via the ANPI Lissone blog, from a post I heartily commend to speakers of the lingo

Primary school-aged children were taught that 'book and musket make the perfect Fascist' (libro e moschetto, fascista perfetto), and the book in question was the one and only primer allowed in the classroom. In it you would read for instance the story of two boys who came back from their holidays, and one of them told the other that he had seen the house where Mussolini was born; or you’d learn about the efforts that the regime made to help the families of Italians abroad so that they could send their children to visit the motherland and draw from its strength and beauty the determination to remain good Italians. They were lies, but told in the present tense. In the new Republic, where the promise of education was that it would set you free, you learnt convenient, harmless truths about the distant past instead.

So here’s one last thing that I remember about the Phoenicians: that they may not even have existed. We give that name to the people who lived in that region, but whether they thought of themselves as a unified people living in a unified nation, or it was in fact the Greeks who succeeded in painting them that way, we just don’t know. And there’s perhaps one last bit of irony, and a lesson: that if you don’t write and understand your own history, somebody else will do it for you.

School

I started school one late September morning of 1977, certain that it would be the sudden and irrevocable end of childhood, of play, of friendships. In hindsight, I think I know why: my sister, being nine years older, would have just completed the first year of the liceo classico, a brutally demanding high school with a staggering drop out rate. They made her life hell, and hers was the only experience of being a student that I had access to. The fact that this is what my primary school looked like can’t have helped much either:



Each floor in that building has to be at least five metres high, and must have looked even more towering to little me. And let’s take a closer look at one of those welcoming front doors:



You don’t need to be a strict Foucauldian or to venture into metaphor to see the contiguity between this kind of space and a prison or an army barracks. And indeed in my first year I encountered a teacher with a true passion for discipline who had plans to cure me of my left-handedness and who sent me home in tears one day because I made a mistake, and she did not tolerate mistakes in her classroom.

But as far as the horrors of school went, that was it: in my second year she retired and was replaced by a group of four young, passionate teachers working together in a pilot programme of full-day instruction. The days were long - we finished at half past four in the afternoon - but there was plenty of time for play and recreation, and other than the occasional after-lunch recess spent hunched over our desks in silence because somebody had broken some cardinal rule or other, I don’t recall the discipline being very strict either. Overall, I remember those years as being formative, both socially and educationally. And what more can you ask of your school?

Except I say it was formative, but it's not as if I remember very well what the teaching and the learning were like. I mostly remember the extra-curricular moments, and that intimidating space and the use we made of it.

Here's the compound again, seen from above.




We lived each year in a different classroom, sitting at rows of desks facing the blackboard and the teacher. We ate bland food in the canteen off a fixed menu, and everything had to be consumed, even the zucchine that had been boiled to within an inch of their molecular integrity. When it wasn't raining, we spent the morning break in the outside yard on the top left of the picture, while the longer break after lunch took place in the inner yard, where for some reason we weren't allowed to play soccer. Therefore the morning break was the fulcrum of the lives of us boys. We played on a concrete basketball court, with jackets or backpacks for goal posts. One of my most enduring memories of primary school is in fact the image of my best mate holding a football under his arms and crying his eyes out because on that particular day we were told we couldn't play. The caretaker was burning a pile of rags in the middle of the court. It was really quite a raging fire, but my friend reckoned we could play around it.

I would love to recapture the time in my life when that kind of explanation - 'the playing surface is on fire' - wasn't enough. That's the raw material that we were, a bunch of small humans liable to choose self-immolation over spending half an hour inside on a sunny day. School cured us of that, to say nothing of the things that it taught us: letters, numbers and words, to read and to summarise and to analyse and to explain, to problems-solve and to stay on topic and to draw neat circles and many other things besides. Not only the foundational skills that we needed to acquire all sorts of useful knowledge down the track, but also the mindset of being a student: to be punctual and to pay attention and to perform to expectation, as well as the expectation to be graded, which of course is the key to the whole thing. A desire to be measured against the standards and do well is just as necessary as the actual ability to do well. It's the fundamental act of compliance on which formal education is predicated, and you must learn to act the part at the earliest possible age.




And so it was that in that first Christmas at school they made us pose for individual portraits. Sitting behind a desk, the primer open before him at what I'm sure must have been a random page, a smile to indicate that he was happy to learn and not at all creeped out by Santa and his trusty bowtie-wearing giraffe sidekick, student 17 of class 1G is the very image of that compliance, of acting the part.

A penny or two for your thoughts, little man. Were you worried even then about writing with the Devil's hand and making too many mistakes? Or had you already caught glimpses of your path, which was that of the good student, always spoken about in glowing terms, taking pride in his achievements?

That lesson became so ingrained that later, at intermediate school, when things came crashing down, I never so much as questioned the fundamental assumption on which it rested: that if you can't hack it at school it is your fault for failing to learn, and never the school's for failing to teach you. Those specimens after all were all around me already. Primary school was designed to tolerate them and carry them along rather than holding them back (or "bowl them", in the extraordinary terminology that is still in use today), but it made no bones about labelling them as failures, and publicly so. I recall one classmate in particular who didn't seem to even fit into that space. He was always out of the line, out of his chair or out of class altogether. The rest of us by and large were successfully regimented: we marched in single or double file between the classroom, the canteen, the playground and the gym, knew how to sit at our desks, knew how to respond when questioned. He knew none of those things, and nobody seemed to feel any solidarity or empathy for him. He was an outcast but not in a romantic, appealing way: he just didn't belong, and seemed to go out of his way to make himself unpleasant to be around. He hated school, and school tolerated him at best, confident that the axe would fall on him at the appointed time, a year or two at the most into his secondary education. I'm sure it never crossed my mind even for a second that my path at that point would overlap with his, and that I'd forget so suddenly and comprehensively how to act the part - but that's a story for another post.

Andrea Gastaldi, Pietro Micca (1858), oil on canvas.

Italian schools that aren't named after Dante Alighieri, Garibaldi or Mazzini are named after a local literary figure or, when all else fails, a "patriot". This is a rather mixed lot, and includes a number of characters who either chose to make the extreme sacrifice so that the country could be freed from the yoke of foreign oppression, or miscalculated the length and speed of the fuse when it was time to blow up the tunnel. Historians are still unsure which of those particular options applies to Pietro Micca, a Piedmontese soldier who saved Turin from capitulating to the hated French during the siege of 1706, ensuring that it would go instead to the House of Savoy, the eventual monarchs of unified Italy and enablers of Fascism.

Just for that we ought to take turns spitting on his grave, but instead he gets schools named after him - go figure. Our perplexing association with this klutz did have however a light-hearted moment each year on the occasion of the school's run, the Sgambamelata, whose mascot was a happy-looking barrel of TNT with a lit fuse running on tiny legs.



If you visit the school's website you'll see that the little fella is still going strong, in spite of suicide bombing having acquired something of a bad name in the intervening years. But looking back on those far from unhappy times, and suspecting that they were integral to a model of education that was far less benign than it appeared and that is now experiencing an unsettling revival, I wonder if we can read something else in that image, perhaps catch a glimpse of the student condition: a sort of exhilarated terror as you ran from test to test, from the spectre of failure to the hope of remedy, always short on time, whilst your childhood was consumed by the urgency of becoming a successful worker and citizen.

Or not.

Join me next week as I tell you everything I learnt at school about the Phoenicians. You may want to bring your sleeping bag and a toothbrush.