A drastic reduction in staffing in the Budget Law, jobs cut for 5,660 teachers and 2,174 supporting staff starting next school year; no additional resources for contracts; 234.000 substitute teachers scheduled this year, a larger amount than even in previous years; more than 25 percent of the teaching staff in Italy who often receive their salaries late; training paths of an increasingly competitive nature that often have the sole purpose of enriching the private entities that deliver the courses; a school reform that is punitive for students and that aims, by increasingly integrating teaching and businesses, to transform public education into a tool for educating competitiveness and acceptance of exploitation.
Italy’s public school system is increasingly at the mercy of the interests of those who want to do profits with students and temporary workers; it is increasingly the victim of those constraints of public spending that, in order to comply with the demands of private capital, aim to reduce the indirect wages of the proletariat to the bare minimum, that is, public services and quality education. Destabilized and reduced to the modus operandi of private companies also because of school autonomy, with school principals induced to behave like managers for the purpose of attracting funds and “consumers,” Italian schools now struggle to offer an educational model that shapes the social consciousness of young people. All of this is in line with the directions that have been conveyed for decades by the European Union and Confindustria, which have been pushing, at a time of crisis in European capitalism in great tension with its competitors, for a type of education – and discipline – that is useful above all to guarantee corporate profits and, therefore, those technical and notional skills necessary only to be competitive in the very short term and in the current production model.
In this sense, the demands of the strike proclaimed by several trade unions for Thursday, October 31, cover many fundamental points and give voice to a widespread malaise and awareness in the school world. Contributing to the success of this mobilization is extremely important. It is crucial, however, to understand the ideological and structural roots behind the conditions of the current school system, which have to do with the current phase of the capitalist economic system. The struggle for public, free, quality education with well-paid professionals and decent contracts goes through the general struggle against this mode of production and, therefore, through organic cooperation with the struggles of the other sectors of the proletariat.
