PESCARA. Maestro Manzi, on TV, taught reading and writing to illiterate Italians, children of war and poverty. Sixty years later, teachers have become Tik Tok, Instagram and Facebook. In the middle, between Maestro Manzi and the social networks, there is the everyday school that tries to decipher the present and chase the future. Another episode of “31 minutes”, the in-depth weekly program of Rete8 in collaboration with the centerwhich airs at 10.30 pm directed by Antonio D’Ottavio. A journey, from the blackboard to memes, between young people and the changing language, starting from the new words now already included in dictionaries such as “trigger” and that is to provoke a reaction. To talk about the evolution of Italian, in a path that supports the changes in society, Pierluigi Ortolanoprofessor of Italian linguistics at the d’Annunzio University of Chieti Pescara.
But what do the kids who are now reinventing Italian want in life? The answer comes from research by the Italian Sociology Society, presented in Parliament with the aim of making politics aware of the needs of young people. In this research it is said that young people from Abruzzo are «strongly linked to their territory, which they consider beautiful from an artistic, naturalistic and landscape point of view and a quiet and safe place to live». There are two main elements according to young people, namely «the request to be listened to to express needs, critical issues and problems» and «the request for participation and involvement in co-planning paths with institutions, to develop targeted projects in a strategic”.
The young people from Abruzzo who express these new needs live (and would like to stay) in a region that is now changing its skin: a region that is struggling to get out of the circle of backwardness, emancipate itself from the south and join the train of the central north. And on this front the push from the kids is decisive. The first sign is the level of education which is increasing more and more: according to Istat data from the latest census, 37.1% of Abruzzo people have at least a high school diploma; 15.8% have a primary school diploma; 26.5% have a middle school diploma; 15.7% have a degree and also a specialization; illiterates are 0.7% of the population while those who know how to read and write but do not have a qualification are 4.3%. Between 2011 and 2019, the number of illiterates in Abruzzo halved while the number of young people with a university degree and above increased and, among these, there are above all women. In the geography of education, L’Aquila and Pescara are the provinces where people with higher qualifications reside. Tertiary education is more widespread in provincial capitals while in small towns the opposite occurs.
Graduates in Abruzzo are growing. In the last 15 years, first level graduates have gone from 35 thousand to 50 thousand with an increase of 42.3%; second level graduates from 112 thousand to 135 thousand with an increase of 19.3%. Women represent 60.1% of first-level graduates; women make up 56.4% of all holders of tertiary and second level qualifications and 51.3% of research doctors, these are values above the national average. In Abruzzo there are almost 5 thousand research doctors.
In this context it is a commonplace to say that young people do not know and no longer know Italian: the difference is the context. Today’s young people are immersed in the internet, communicate via chat and use terms that many adults do not know or understand. “Malaise” no longer just indicates a «physical ailment of an unspecified nature», as the dictionary says, but it is also a bad person who causes anxiety and frustration. But besides unlimited gigs, rivers of ink also flow among teenagers: there are even kids who, at 13, have already written a book. Francesca Annese he is 14 years old and, last year, he was only in eighth grade, in Pescara, when he wrote “Heric and the crystal prophecy”; Andrea Genovese from Pescara, at the age of 16 he wrote “Love in the time of coronavirus”; Beatrice Bonanni di Nicola16 years old from Pescara, is the author of “The starry sky inside me”; Filippo Guidialso from Pescara, at the age of 20 wrote “The boy who screamed in silence”.
And then there are those who train in knowing why studying is like sport: Maria Barbieri, 15 years old, attends the Torlonia classical high school in Avezzano and is the national Italian champion, elected in the final which took place in Ercolano. To win he had to create a summary of a short essay, the composition of an informative text for a brochure starting from two photographs of the artist Dorothea Lange and, finally, a creative text that told, in journalistic style, the return of Marco Polo to Venice. And this was the verdict of the jury, chaired by the academic from Crusca Gianluca Barone: «An excellent lexical richness emerges from the productions, supported by a non-trivial syntactic structure and clear and correct writing».
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