Meloni’s freedom-suppressing government: history textbooks in schools are like political rallies

Some stories write themselves. The manual under fire is the third volume of Trame del tempo, the ‘red’ edition, and the passages on the freedom-suppressing Meloni government are on page 666. In short, we’re in Dan Brown territory. Otherwise, nothing new. A couple of years ago on Amazon, the very same textbook was dismissed with a one-star rating: ‘Partisan, spiteful, political’. Since today, five-star reviews of the opposite persuasion have been pouring in: ‘Finally, a textbook that takes a stand against the government’. The ‘textbook war’ is an Italian literary genre, with its own rituals, its classics, and its seasonal resurgences. When I was a boy, there were the Camera-Fabietti, the Revelli-Ortoleva and the Giardina-Sabbatucci-Vidotto textbooks, all accused of leading us towards communism. This led to motions, draft legislation and expert committees on the hunt for ‘arbitrary reconstructions’.

I remember AN MPs and members of Azione Studentesca stamping the ‘offending’ books at Feltrinelli bookshops, collecting reports via text message, reciting selected passages on Stalin and the gulags, and counting the lines devoted to the Foibe massacres (when any were included). Whilst the world was discovering the wonders of the Internet, we were arguing about the Spanish Civil War and the defeat at Guadalajara. Years went by; with great effort, they managed to add a bit about the foibe, a bit about the gulags, but then another problem arose: the glaring omission of Italian war crimes in the African campaign! And so it all started again from scratch. Then identity politics arrived. The accusations became endless: patriarchal law, racist grammar, Veltroni’s book on the Constitution distributed in primary schools as compulsory reading, gender ideology even in arithmetic, ‘Paolino va al mercato con i suoi due papà…’ (it really exists).

The fact is that contemporary history is, by its very nature, a biased discipline, subject to the proximity of events and the perspective of the writer. The subject is still in the room, protesting, getting worked up. Moreover, the authors of history textbooks were, for the most part, trained within the Marxist paradigm. This is not an accusation: to claim otherwise would be to suggest one has spent the last sixty years on another planet. Of course, there is a difference between a regional accent and a political rally. One can recount the present with Gramsci’s cadence without resorting to handing out leaflets at school. There is, so to speak, a threshold of elegance that our page 666 has overlooked. But if only that were the problem. If only.

Not long ago, Andrea Atzemi, Luigi Marco Bassani and Carlo Lottieri set about reading a selection of school textbooks adopted in Italy from the 1990s onwards ("A scuola di declino", highly recommended). If there is one dominant theme, one underlying current, one ideological thread running through these history textbooks, it is hostility towards the logic of capitalism, always and in all circumstances. The state is equated with progress; only the faults of the market are highlighted; and ‘every step towards economic freedom must be understood as a form of decline’. This is why people take to the streets ‘against capitalism’ and never against the INPS (and besides, capitalism is the perfect enemy; it wins hands down against all the others).

It is widely acknowledged that in schools or universities, one is unlikely to encounter anyone who speaks passionately about the squalor, misery and horror of planned economies, or the importance of economic freedom. This is a regrettable situation, yet how can we address it? The answer, unfortunately, is that we cannot. We must simply accept this reality. After all, the school must necessarily adopt a solidarity-oriented, statist, and socialist-leaning stance, because once we have grown up, we will all become individualists. From a right-wing perspective, however, there is little cause for alarm: the more school is perceived as “left-wing”, the greater the likelihood of embracing right-wing views in adulthood (much like with I Promessi Sposi, whose greatness is perhaps only fully appreciated at the age of forty, when rereading it without the influence of school). In short, the textbook-style contempt for ‘private enterprise’ serves a sacrosanct function of social prevention: have you chosen, as adults, to become self-employed in Italy? Too bad for you – we warned you at school.