Lamezia Terme – Stories of schools open “at night”, with parents organized in the form of associations who choose to take care of the places and save entire areas from degradation, as happened in Tor Bella Monaca, in Rome. Students who, outside of school hours, use the school facilities to study and enjoy social gatherings. Openness, trust, responsibility: these are the three key words of “open schools”, from the perspective of the educational community, at the center of the training conference promoted by the permanent observatory for school inclusion “Antonio Saffioti” together with the network of city schools for inclusion, held in recent days at the “Carlo Rambaldi” Technology Center in Lamezia Terme, which saw the participation of teachers from city schools of all levels. The focus of the meeting, opened by the president of the Observatory Alfredo Saladini, is the testimonies of Giovanni Del Bene and Angelo Lucio Rossi, school managers and authors, together with Rossella Viaconzi, of two in-depth studies on the topic of the educating community.
“The school is either open or self-referential,” said Rossi, recounting the experience he carried out, as a manager, in a school reality in a municipality in the Milanese hinterland where a parents’ association set in motion a process of active participation collective to the life of the school: from the summer school experiment, recently back in vogue in the political debate, to the village school created at the urging of Don Antonio Mazzi. “One of the most surprising results – said Rossi – was to see kids who were starting to have a passion for teaching and someone was starting to think about becoming a teacher. We only communicate what we love.” “Ensure that good practices become generative” was the warning of Giovanni Del Bene, highlighting how “in Italy we have a primary school which is among the first in Europe while with secondary school a collapse in self-esteem begins in children: it prevails the logic of the textbook to be followed, the program to be carried out risks taking precedence over the person. Let’s talk about education, not bureaucratic structures.” For the president of the Italian Volunteer Movement Gianluca Cantisani, “the Berlinguer reform on school autonomy anticipated the principle of subsidiarity introduced by the reform of Title V of the Constitution. Already at the end of the 90s, the first parents’ associations were born in Rome, citizens and families went further well before the regulatory forecasts. Schools represent an advanced front for experimentation. The next school law will have to be written by those who have brought forward innovative experiences.” The extraordinary commissioner of the ASP of Catanzaro Antonio Battistini touched on the issue of life projects for children with disabilities, not hiding “the lack of specific skills in the area in terms of child neuropsychiatry. There is a lack of professional figures and dedicated hospitalization areas in Calabria and throughout the South. It is necessary to de-bureaucratize life plans, evaluate the real needs of children, understand the need we are faced with which should not be medicalised”.
Don Giacomo Panizza gave his testimony, focusing on the role of the educational community to spread the culture of legality and the common good among children. The meeting, which was attended by the school directors Giuseppe De Vita, Daniela Quattrone and Margherita Primavera, opened with greetings from the Rambaldi director Anna Primavera who urged us to relaunch the project network on inclusion undertaken together with the Observatory and to various city schools which “finally posed the theme of inclusion not as a fact of individual schools but as a central issue of the entire school in Lamezia and on which the schools network”.
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