The results of Italian students’ high school diploma exams have now come out, and they’re pretty bad. Huge numbers of Italian teenagers miserably failed their written Italian language exam and will have to retake their senior year. They will be spending the summer indoors instead of hanging out at the beach or in nightclubs.
There’s a kind of national shock at the paucity of these results. I have to say, I was flabbergasted as I read the online reports of the grammar, history and cultural mistakes that had been made in some of this year’s essays. For instance, one student tried to write “pinacoteca”, the name of Brera’s famous art gallery, but instead had written paninoteca, which means “sandwich bar”. Maybe that was just a slip of the pen. But one interesting theory presented by a student suggested a more profound lack of understanding: the cold war, this student claimed, originally got its name because it had been fought in Siberia, where it is freezing cold.
“If there are bad students it means there are bad teachers around,” said Anna, a retired high school teacher who almost fainted when she read the list of exam errors. “Our education system is on the brink of collapse and needs a total revamp, but politicians keep turning a blind eye to the problem.”
My mother is a retired Italian language professor, and she told me that, if they are showing such chronically low levels of linguistic proficiency, as well as cultural and historical knowledge, then it is almost certainly not their fault. Something else is going on.
“Your social and family background turn out to be very important,” said Anna, but more important is “the system in which students grow. Our politicians aren’t upgrading the education sector, and most teachers are old-style and use outdated textbooks.”
“I think it’s more than that,” added my mom. “It’s the sign of our inevitable cultural decline, and hardly anyone is taking the issue seriously.”
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The degree of cultural ignorance is fairly startling. One student suggested in an essay that Marie Curie had been awarded an Oscar. Another suggested that the Nobel peace prize had at one time been awarded to Adolf Hitler. Other students believe that Mussolini was the leader of the Italian Communist Party (although, truth be told, he had started off as a socialist).
One notable error was the student who couldn’t quite remember the name of the Dardanelles Straits, and instead called them the “Gargamel Strait”, which of course is the name of the evil wizard from The Smurfs.
What struck me the most, however, were the reports of the mistakes made by teachers. One news story said that a teacher had informed a class that Hitler was Polish, and that the second world war had in fact happened in 1915. One teacher told the class that America was discovered in 1789, and that the US was a German ally in the first world war.
The education system in Italy is in a very bad way, and there are many teachers here who need to improve their skills or perhaps find a different line of work. Many old teaching systems and textbooks need to be binned.
Perhaps all this is a bit mean. It’s true that Italian language and culture have always been tough subjects. But now it seems some of these errors are creeping up into university level. I mean, can you really call yourself an Italian politics student if you can’t even spell Machiavelli?
Silvia Marchetti is a freelance reporter based in Rome
