A peep into Italian education…

schooling

In grade 5 of an elementary school in my neighbourhood in Monza (Italy), there is a small table in a corner of the classroom with a journal of ‘emotions’ lying open. Whenever a child is happy, bored, sad, nervous, or simply feeling a little naughty, they can head over to the journal and write about how they are feeling. “I am sad today because Anna is not talking to me” or “I am not sure why I am feeling very excited today! Maybe because the sun is out!” All kind of feelings are welcome.

In grade 3, two rooms down the corridor, a teacher loves to read aloud stories from Italo Calvino’s ‘Fables of Magical Objects’ to his enraptured class. In the two sections of Grade 4, students are learning where to place the Sumerians and Babylonians of Mesopotamia on a timeline of great civilisations. Before they graduate from primary school, they will also study the Egyptian Civilisation, the Indus Valley Civilisation, Greek gods and goddesses and will take a deep dive into the Roman Empire and all things Caesar, Augustus and Constantine.

Italian students also have another subject that runs across their entire schooling years - Religion. This is a Catholic-based curriculum, approved by the church and state, taught by a teacher who has been theoretically trained and recognised by a local bishop or church. Students can opt out of the class but most sit in for it because it is not assessment based.

However, the subject taken most seriously in Italian schools is Italian. By the time these eleven year olds will enter middle school, they will be able to dissect any Italian sentence into its grammatical and logical parts, drawing red lines under verbs of any of the three conjugations, green under articles and describe the gender and number of all types of concrete and abstract nouns, simple and articulate prepositions along with adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, subjects, predicates and objects thrown in. It may all sound a bit excessive especially given an old fashioned learning and teaching style. But it paves the way for high school years where they will study Latin. Italians are well versed in the mother tongue and have a great appreciation of the depth and breadth of this very beautiful and grammatically challenging language.

When I first arrived in Italy, over a decade ago, I was enamoured mostly by the typical touristic places and landmarks. At the time, the greatest luxury in life was having coffee under the spring sun, watching a world slowly unfold in an old town piazza. My curiosity shifted from the country to its people as I began making more friends. And in my conversations, I came away with a disheartening realisation that there were some very basic gaps in my knowledge about many things. Let me explain.

I attended one of the best schools in Karachi and academically, did very well. Like most children pressured to succeed at exams, I followed the Cambridge University curricula for O and A ‘levels and never sat for an exam without the confidence of knowing all that I was expected to know. So why were there such big gaping holes in my understanding of basic concepts?

For instance, I could explain a concept like gravity very briefly, but also very unconvincingly in a few lines. My Italian friends, however, could reference the orbit of the planets, and take the conversation further to Copernicus’s model of sun as the centre. They could cite Galileo and his findings as if it was neighbourhood gossip they heard the other day or name any and all types of dinosaurs and look up to point out the Cumulonimbus cloud.

Perhaps the gap lay in our curriculum or the grades obsessed teaching and learning system, the lack of innovative teaching methods or perhaps, my fading memory three decades on from schooling. Or maybe, it was the fact that we zoned in on different aspects of learning.

Here, an ordinarily educated adult is familiar with classical music in a more ‘educated’ and in-depth way than I have ever been taught about our own traditional music or poetry.

They can spot a Rachmaninoff composition from a Chopin and allude to Roman mythological characters and stories as metaphors, jokes or ironic interventions around dinner table conversations. When my son asks a random question about the Partisans, or the World Wars, or the creation of the unified Italy everyone knows various battles by name, dates and characters to build a vivid narrative.

Much of the education - especially history - is understandably built around the context in which one lives. It isn’t difficult to imagine why in Pakistan we wouldn’t know much about Greek mythology and Roman aqueducts. Our history books in early secondary school included local stories like Buddha, Chandragupta Maurya, the Kushan warriors (although I don’t remember studying about Hindu mythology). And then, unless you took history as an A ‘level subject, it all vanished to be replaced by Pakistan Studies.

But mainly it is in scientific education where I feel we had the weakest foundation. I am tempted to say that this gap has, perhaps, a lot more to do with teaching than with the curriculum. Teaching involves transmitting a learned and learnable passion to understand the fundamentals of how things work, explaining basic concepts with clarity, knowledge and support to connect many dots. All of this also has to do with being embedded in a society and environment of questioning, inquiry, research where people engage in debates that keep that scientific curiosity and engagement alive. And some of it may also have to do with allowing scientific ideas (say, evolution) to simply breathe in a non-moralistic, non-theoretical environment. It’s all more than the syllabus and grade assessment.

Like the Pakistani grade-oriented approach, Italian education system is also mainly assessment based and at the high school where I teach, students generally complain about stress and heavy workload of assignments, tests, and oral exams. On a side note, oral exams are a big thing here and are conducted regularly, even for Mathematics.

Like many other systems around the world, high school here also depends mostly on memorisation and rote learning, and remains centred on lecture style teaching methods.

The primary and middle school years are seen as essential preparation ground for students to prepare them for what they will experience in high school. And those who continue on this academically challenging journey (as opposed to more vocation/profession based institute track) will encounter a fascinating subject: Philosophy.

The philosophy curriculum is comprehensive, beginning with the concept and tools of philosophical inquiry with an introduction to logic and argumentation. Using primary texts, students cover ancient philosophy, the medieval period down to contemporary ideas. They hold discussions on faith and reason, on Rationalism, Enlightenment and Existentialism. They learn to develop intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, argumentative skills and understand how big philosophical ideas interact with scientific, cultural, and social movements across the world.

Perhaps some of these philosophical questions will fall on inexperienced ears and unexplored lives of sixteen year olds. Perhaps many scientific concepts will never be needed in life, and maybe the detailed analysis of the Italian language puts undue focus on rules. In today’s ever changing world, possibly there is no need to teach Latin and Ancient Greek and should we really begin history with the ancient civilisations at the expense of learning about more contemporary historical events? Many of these questions on curricular reform are often debated by parents and practitioners and there is a great scope for improvement.

However, I see all these subjects as tiny little pieces that fit together to make a complete puzzle of an educated person whose knowledge weaves the understanding of the world together. I must confess that in my basic schooling, many pieces of the puzzle remained missing, or were so loosely set together that they easily fell off along the way.

Aliya is a former producer with Geo TV. She is now based in Italy where she teaches. She can be reached at aliyais@gmail.com