2023-06-22 20:25:54
by Ernesto Galli della Loggia
Can things like artificial intelligence, surrogacy, the war in Ukraine be taught? No, but the school is based on the idea that culture as a whole serves more than anything else to understand current events.
The news! the news! it’s all a variously modulated chorus that resounds at fixed deadlines: the Italian school lacks topicality, in the tracks for the license exam there is little topicality!
Well: do we want to end this topical story for once?! I apologize for the abrupt tone, but what is the news? Until proven otherwise what is happening today, the issues being debated today: for example artificial intelligence, the surrogate womb, the war in Ukraine. Does anyone who invokes current affairs at every turn think that the school should teach these things? And what does it mean to teach these things? Does it perhaps mean going into the bibliography on the relations between Kiyv’s Russia and Muscovy or into the events of the Holodomor? Does it mean examining the functioning of the very complex algorithms with which AI works? Does it mean becoming familiar with the action of the hormones necessary to facilitate the implantation of a fetus in a uterus or with the legal problems involved in pregnancy for others? And all this with teenagers? It seems to me that it is difficult for anyone to believe that. So I see no alternative: introducing current events into school ultimately means only one thing: more or less repeating what the newspapers write in classrooms, mimicking the debates on television talk shows. And in fact, let’s be clear: what else, or little more, will the tens of thousands of themes that the day before yesterday chose the topical track be reduced to?
Sure: Dante, the French Revolution, the basics of mathematics and physics, Marx, as such have little to do with current events. Either they are outdated or they are something else entirely. But the school is based on the idea that overall their knowledge serves more than anything else even for this: to understand current events, to orient themselves in it and to form one’s own opinion. It’s called culture, in case we forgot.
June 22, 2023 (change June 22, 2023 | 20:23)
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#Maturity #learn #orient #oneself #current #events #time.news