The death of the young Lorenzo Parelli, crushed by a steel beam on his last day of school-work alternation, throws a tragic light on an experiment begun in 2015 with the Renzi government’s “good school” and never archived.
Lorenzo Parelli he was doing the last day of an alternation between school and work between the Vocational Training Center he attended and the Burimec company in Lauzacco.
The school-work alternation is regulated in a diversified way according to the high schools: in the high schools the so-called Pcto – Pathways for transversal skills and orientation – were inaugurated – while in the professional the alternation has also remained in the wording.
What is certainly common in many of these experiences is the low or zero educational quality and the lack of training on the work culture of these experiences between work and school. In some cases the internship turns into real free work, therefore into a form of exploitation.
It is often the companies that make instrumental use of Pcto and school-work alternation, when looking for young, low-cost labor without trade union rights.
The death of Lorenzo Parelli cannot fail to have consequences. It happened at a time when the school system has proven to be clearly inadequate for elementary education needs. The pandemic has opened a very black Pandora’s box: insufficient and dilapidated classrooms, staff reduced to the bone, inadequate programs, non-existent openness to society except for the work-company channel; yet a constant and pervasive ideological campaign has continued in recent years to smuggle school-work alternation as an opportunity for development, growth and innovation. Minister Bianchi, who insists a lot on an even stronger integration between school and companies, wanted to comment on the death of Lorenzo Parelli with a sentence that leaves one puzzled: “The internship must be a life experience”.
Let’s be clear: students need to have more school. Let’s stop the high school reform in four years and the extension of the ITS reform (the higher technical institutes). Rather, we try to increase the number of university students and graduates, and let companies pay for corporate training.
The constitution provides that the school is education for citizenship, not a place where one learns to be exploited, to work for free, ignoring the culture of work, and risking death.
As parents, teachers, school workers, students, we think the time has come to say enough, in a clear and definitive way, to the cowardice of school-work alternation.
Boys and girls go to school to study, not to offer free arms to a job that is intended to be formative, while the youth unemployment rate steadily stopped at 30%.
It is not a question of closing the doors of the school to external experiences provided that these are really included in an educational project, retain a cultural value, are not mandatory and therefore binding on passing the state exam.
This is why the time has come to abolish school-work alternation and to start a serious reflection on public schools and on the rights of young workers.
Appeal prepared by Salvatore Cannavò and Christian Raimo: we collect all the subscriptions to: [email protected]