Today is already tomorrow

And so, for the third consecutive school year, the school is dealing with the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. The first was the year of the generalized lockdown, that of the total stop of the school in attendance starting from March; the second was the year marked by stop & go, made up of continuous isolation and quarantines; this third is the year in which the return to class seems - at least at the moment - to have really restored the physical dimension of learning, even and especially in high schools, where the percentage of vaccinated children is decidedly considerable.

In this scenario, teachers find themselves facing the effects that the crisis has had on students. An evident impact, now attested by an important number of studies and researches, which highlights a general loss of learning (55.3%), the emergence of psychological disorders among students, a strong impact of poverty on families and children who attend school and, in the most serious cases, an increase in cases of school dropout. The idea is increasingly gaining ground among experts that to combat these effects it is necessary to focus on students' leadership and on teaching innovation, thus enhancing the role of boys and girls in the improvement process of the school system. And that it is necessary to do it in time, as soon as possible, promptly, because the educational paths are linked together and any slowdown today has repercussions on tomorrow.

It will also be important to concretely implement the interventions envisaged by the PNRR, those that in particular give priority to the most deprived contexts, involving schools, students and the realities of the territory in the planning and implementation of the interventions. There is an instrument, that of the Community Educational Pacts, which will be very useful in this regard.

But more generally, concrete support for families with minors should not be forgotten: Italy is a country where the birth of a child (starting from the second) contributes to concretely increase the risk to fall into poverty. State interventions, starting with the Citizenship Income (which in its current formulation penalizes families with children) and the Universal Single Check (an absolute novelty starting next January after the transitional phase of the temporary allowance which began last July ), try to reduce the negative effects of poverty on children and young people, but do not fully grasp, and not yet, the importance of the issue. What is at stake is not only the construction of the knowledge of the new generations and their active participation in society, but the very future of a country already undergoing a particularly acute and potentially lethal demographic crisis. What we will do in the months ahead will have an epochal impact on society in the coming decades: becoming aware of it is the first step to move better.


Stefano Caredda
NP November 2021