In the early afternoon of the last day of January, all over Italy, a very strong double thunder must have been heard. A telluric movement also recorded by the national institute of geophysics and volcanology, a high pitched sound that escapes any classification in decibels. The only thing missing was that it was getting dark all over the earth. It was the composed and dignified reaction of the high school students to the news on the State Exam.
The heartfelt appeals were of no avail, the ministry showed itself insensitive to the cry of pain that from so much of Italy, with letters and collections of signatures, implored the abolition of writings. The writings are there. The dreaded theme, declined in seven shades of panic and the second test, benignly prepared by jubilant internal commissions on the program actually carried out. The fact that the oral examination was abolished thesis, that is, that imaginative multidisciplinary jumble based on virtuosic and circus connections from which one usually started, allowing candidates to start moving on known terrain, has not yet been metabolized. The assimilation of the news will cause several aftershocks.
However, the writings return. Part of yesterday’s uproar came not only from the highlands, but also from the jubilation of those who cheered at the cry of “it was time, so they learn, which these kids of today cannot write ”. It would be enough to take a tour, reading the comments of the keyboard lions on any social network, to realize that in any case it is not only the young people of today who are struggling with stylus in hand. And I don’t want to be cynical, but I think I can reasonably make two predictions about this maturity of renewed rigor.
The first is that it won’t be very different from the others. Once the admissions to the exam have been decreed, as usual those who usually study will come out well, the others less. The second is that the reintroduction of the writings, primarily the Italian theme, it doesn’t get much better skills in written production. It is not a revolution, it is just a theme. One. Often unaccustomed to it after years of a school that increasingly focuses on structured, synthetic, choice-based assessments multiple. To which we arrive – in many cases, but fortunately not all – without the habit of silence, the re-elaboration of thought, the multiple attempts to find the most suitable term, without constant exercise, which costs sometimes unsuccessful tests, an exercise which has to leave very soon or you run the risk of seeing gangrenous errors that are more and more difficult to eradicate over the years.
I would really like to share the enthusiasm of those who, with evident satisfaction, see in the choices for this maturity the triumphal return to a severe and selective school, but it seems to me instead a way of saying that everything is back in place when it is not yet in place. nothing returned, not even the students from quarantines. Had they had the courage to change, at the Ministry, had dared. They had said with a bold motto “smaller classes and more little thoughts in second grade”, yes, that would have been a courageous and far-sighted innovation. Maybe next time. In the meantime, I feel I can send a reassuring message to the growing dismayed ones: if there is one thing we have all learned to do, in these two years, is to get by, despite it all. So rest assured, you will be fine.