“We made a handbook to provide all components with formal and practical tools to counteract the growing military presence in schools and at the same time propose a different idea of school and society”, they explain from the Observatory. Contesting how the presence of the police, carabinieri, financiers, military, although not new, has now intensified in the last two years: “We want to denounce a drift of the schoolwhere men and women in uniform appear more and more often to hold conferences or lessons of various types relating to safetyto the professional promotion of their own body, while outside of schools it often happens that school groups are taken to barracks and military bases for ceremonies or promotional initiatives, as well as (in secondary schools) for activities linked to the ‘Paths for transversal skills and orientation'”, he reports Michele Lucivero. According to him “this is outside of educational logic. We have to build a symbolic universe different from that belligerent“. It’s still: “Leonardo Foundation fills our schools with money, trains us and ‘trains’ us as teachers to use the language of artificial intelligence, functional to the logic of war”.
But militarization also passes through projects such as that of “I for Intelligence”, the result of an agreement between the Ministry of Education and the merit of the Northern League Giuseppe Valditara and the DIS, the body in charge of the secret servicesas the journalist explains Antonio Mazzeo, author of the book “School goes to war”. It was launched last April 16, “to train secondary school students in the first two years to learn the relevance of the secret services themselves and the function of theintelligence. An exhibition has been set up which ends with a test: for those who pass there is a sort of ‘budding 007’ license. In practice, the idea of a school for peace education disappears from the Italian scholastic world,” he says. But it is not the only example of the now close link between the military world and that of education, complete with curricula subordinate “to the logic of war and the dominant political-military interests”.
“Even if the process of militarization has been a phenomenon that has been present for years, bipartisan, with the advent of the Meloni government, we can record a increase in rhetoric, as well as frequent attempts to “historical revisionism“, they explain from the Observatory, starting from themselves educational programs. Consider, Mazzeo himself specifies, “how the First World War is told, the version of ‘the great war’ is proposed again, with the same values used by Fascism, such as the concept of heroism. Considered as a phase of completion of the Italian Risorgimento which allows the creation of a national identity. A word repeated several times in the documents proposed by the ministries. Paradoxical in a school where a ninth of the students, even if born and raised in Italy, are not recognized citizenship“.
And instead Michele Lancionefull professor at the Polytechnic of Turin, to explain in his speech the risks connected to ‘Dual Use’ in the research: “Our University has multiple agreements signed with companies that operate in the military universe, including Leonardo Spa, one of the largest companies producing weapons and defense and security systems in the world, linked to teaching and research. Research that often takes place in Leonardo’s civil areas, such as photovoltaic panels for aerospace. But by connecting actors and researchers, an immediate social network is created, which through dual use allows the technological transfer of those technologies developed in the civil sector, very easily on the military one“. And again: “By creating this direct relationship, a preferential channel is created. But can the University offer a strategic advantage to the military world? It is right to have direct client relationships with the military world, as happens here at the Polytechnic of Turin with Frontex?” accuses Lancione. Because, he adds, “maps and thematic cartographies are created by the Polytechnic, but it is not a situation of research, but of offering a service to a European agency put under investigation by the EU itself for pushbacks against migrants and asylum seekers”. The consequence, he concludes, is “that we deprive ourselves of the possibility of having other relationships, with humanitarian agencies and activists working in the opposite direction”. And if the minister is a Forzista Anna Maria Bernini accuses those who protest of wanting to limit freedom of research, Lancione reverses the perspective: “In reality It is these agreements that limit freedom of research“.
