“We are the future, we are building it together, seeing the footsteps on which we have passed and leaving new ones for those who will come later”: in his somewhat poetic and dreamy style, the minister Bianchi thus answered the question of the director of Italian Tech, Riccardo Luna, about what the future is for him. The key word here is “building”, which Bianchi used several times during his speech live on italian.tech.
Pressed by the questions of Luna and the director of Repubblica, Maurizio Molinari, the owner of the Education has promised that “we will open a construction site for the school of the future”, in fact trying to learn from the past, from distance learning done (and a bit suffered) between 2020 and 2021: “Dad taught us that there are other ways and that there are other worlds – Bianchi said – We can use that experience as a basis, take advantage of it, remembering how this thing was born “. That is? “That is, we started using it as an alternative to dropping out, as a way for kids to stay connected to school. Why the alternative was not to teach“. And yet, according to the minister, we can do better than this: “We made the mistake of remotely replicating what happened in the presence, of replicating the teacher-student relationship by putting a computer in the middle. Only this is not good, because we have to use the tools, not be used”.
In short, for Bianchi there is a problem of skills, which obviously does not concern (or does not concern very little) children: “At this moment, all compulsory school students were born in this century, while more or less all teachers were born in the last century. They are the ones who need training ”. How? According to the minister, “by crossing competences, thinking about a reskilling of adults, a school that continues to never finish, which begins before the age of 6 and continues after the age of 18”. It will be fundamental to widen the audience of teachers trained by National plan Digital school well over the approximately 50,000 who benefited from it in 2020.
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by Bruno Ruffilli
What will happen in September
Looking to the near future, the minister’s intentions became clear, during the chat in the Italian Tech studios. As well as its goals: “We have to fight abandonment school, because it is not possible that in some areas of Italy it reaches 30%. We want securing buildings, in which we have invested 1.25 billion euros “. More: “I want a national school, where thanks to what we have learned to do with Dad, the skills of an institute in Rome can reach the classrooms of an institute in Syracuse “. And Bianchi wants “a school without fear of modern tools, because between us and smartphones, it is we who must be smart “.
As to how much of the students will return in attendance, this is obviously an assessment that will be made following the trend of the contagion at the end of the summer: “I count a lot on mass vaccination of children, which is important, ”the minister admitted.
In the next few months, in the meantime, we will continue with the Summer School project, also to counteract abandonment and to recover those children who have had greater difficulties in the months of distance learning: “It is part of my idea of a school that never ends, which continues to train both those who teach and those who receive the teaching . It’s part of my idea of a school that keeps skills as fluid as possible, as interconnected as possible ”. Also, of a more inclusive school, more respectful of Article 2 of the Constitution (the one that says among other things that “all citizens have equal social dignity and are equal before the law”), because “we must not form an elite, but a country. Because school is a mirror of the country”.
interview
At school of apps, the digital youth academy
at Antonio Dini
The question of children’s data
Chatting with Luna and Molinari, the minister also addressed the problem of how much there was during the Dad rely on the big tech giants, like Google and Microsoft, who provided the necessary software, but also collected a lot of data on students and teachers: “We are securing this information”, admitted Bianchi, “because it was not safe before”. From here, the discussion moved briefly to the relationship of Italy, and more generally of Europe, with these companies and with the two most important poles of technology in the world, the United States and the China: “The EU must become aware of the fact that not only we must, but also we can be protagonists, that we have many excellences that we can assert”. So what? “And so we will play them at the next G20”, which opens on 22 June in Catania.
Pending that date and in view of the ballots for the end of this school year, two i messages that the minister would give to children and teachers: “I would say to the former not to fear evaluations and judgments, because it is also through them that they can grow and make sense of themselves; to the latter to realize the moment, the situation we have just passed”. To both of you, that “suffering makes one become more united“. It also allows us to reconstruct. Or to build, in fact.
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