It’s five thirty in the morning and Mattia is sitting on a bench scribbled with graffitti that has almost faded away, he rubs his fingers into his face, his eyes heavy and a little swollen from sleep which betray fatigue, something to which he has already given in to: “haffta’ work to pay the rent, otherwise it’ll mean trouble”. He must be about six foot and weighs only seventy kilos. His upper body slightly bending forward and his head, steady, doesn’t move away from his workplace at the construction site where he’s working. “But what does it serve to study, sorry?? I do not know anything anyway. My mother never had the money for the books and I’m the worst: I was failed twice before dropping out of high school; not everyone is good at studying and I chose to work. Honour to those who work “.
Mattia is twenty-three, and works as a full-time bricklayer. He’s on the go 12 hours a day and is already beginning to complain about first symptoms of cervical pain. He keeps repeating to himself and to those few others who ask him that ” school was just not for me.” “Well actually I’m not getting on very well anyway with this work, they haven’t being paying for past four months, they just not paying. The owner of the building-site keeps saying there’s a crisis but it’s not crisis for me. I do not give a heck because if I lose my job, I’ll end up in the middle of the road “.
Mattia’s story is similar to that of many other young men of his age. There are myriads of people like him in Italy: in coffee- bars, malls, in grey apartment blocks in the peripheries, on the benches in the gardens of big cities. From North to South, every year, hundreds of thousands of young people shut the school-doors behind them.
The phenomenon of early school leaving, according to istat (Italian Statistic Agency), has involved 110,000 students between 18 and 24 years of age up to 2013. The percentage accounts for 17%, no less than seven points above the European average and fourth place among the community “black shirts”. Early school-leavers, boys and girls reach a peak amongst those who drop out in the eighth grade or other training courses – this rate is estimated at 22% when moving to southern regions such as Campania and Sicily.
The decision to leave school early is the result of numerous factors. At the heart of the cause of this phenomenon includes the family context, which often sees parents absent and little inclined towards culture, and inattentive to the peculiarities of the individual pupil, his problems and needs. Italian schools lack assistance, support, educational programmes apt to motivate the pupil to wake up in the morning and “to go and become a citizen.” There are no fundamental technologies like wireless Internet access and one pupil in two, according to the latest survey by skuola.net, said that he had never seen a computer in class before. Moreover, several associations have launched various “emergency school” programmes in many cities such as Perugia: Caritas which finances educational expenses of households affected by the crisis and this “uneasiness”, for many children, has become a deterrent “number one” in the pursuit of their studies.
To face this problem, in the south of Italy, also “Save The Children Association”, gave way to a programme “Star Players” (Fouri classe). The project involved 750 students between Crotone, Scalea and Naples, and pledged to promote, even in summer, several workshops and study support for pupils even during the summer, to those who were at risk of “dropping out”: those who had the greatest number of absences and were late-comers had lower school averages. In two years, “Champion” has managed to halve the numbers of early school leavers and increased the average amongst youths up to 6%. “This critical situation, which ranks Italy last on the list in Europe,” said Raffaela Milano, Italian -Europe Program Director of Save the Children:
“there is a widespread condition of ‘ educational ‘ poverty afflicting the whole country which is particularly drastic in southern regions of Italy: early childhood services are almost non-existent, few schools, no full-time opportunity in sport, music and other recreational activities “.
No room is given to the value of knowledge, enthusiasm towards the world and life. The pervasiveness in criminal networks, according to Raffaella Milano, “foster situations of exploitation ready to enlist the young “. Those like Mattia, to whom no-one has informed him of his rights. And this is a slap in the face that is reverberates more than the echo of the reforms announced on screens and newspapers. We speak of cancelling job-insecurity in the teaching sector, of billions of Euros of subsidies to restore school-buildings, introduction of full-time lessons in foreign languages, teaching everyone economy, of bringing the world of work into the classroom, getting private investments for setting up workshops and putting at the centre on first trial, the short essay.
True to say, the school-buildings are falling to bits and the majority of Italians donot speak any English. But if the pupil is not first “reformed”, if the first necessity to motivate the pupil to go to school does not become the principle necessity for those who do attend school, we would probably reach the point where one day no-one will care to want to go.
Traduzione: Marina Stronati
