The school institution

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Context and problem: the “school-as-business”

The Italian school has roots in the country’s unification and has been crossed by continuous reforms ever since. From the 1990s onward — with head teachers given managerial status and, later, school autonomy and the 2015 “Buona Scuola” reform — the system progressively adopted the language and tools of management: performance evaluation, reporting, education as a product to be “sold” to family-clients.

The risk is that the quality of education gets measured through quantitative metrics — pass rates, standardized tests, family satisfaction — rather than through the real capacity to form critical, autonomous and aware individuals.

The three actors of the educational system

• Teachers — the true institution of the school: a role of authority requiring deep personal and professional preparation, yet today crushed by pressure, syllabi, and declining social recognition.
• Families — the keystone between teachers and students, often alone in the educational task (“it takes a village to raise a child”, and that village has largely disappeared), sometimes over-protective.
• Students — the recipients of education, but not its only element: the gap between life inside and outside school, the impact of the internet, the “vice” of labels and of grades as KPIs.

Possible actions

A cultural movement toward a profound change in the very idea of “education”, with an educational team covering all areas of growth — technical, affective, civic, creative, sporting, “spiritual” in a secular sense — and spaces of listening and self-care for teachers.

Starting from the principle that you cannot teach what you are not, the intervention aims to offer teachers spaces of practice, listening and care, so they can bring a conscious and responsible presence into the classroom.