The 30 per cent and the rest of the class. A debate

Marta: If, in a class, eight out of ten children do not speak Italian well, that is no longer just a problem for those eight. It becomes a problem for everyone. If we want to promote integration, we must avoid such concentrations.

Luca: I agree with the premise but not with the conclusion. You just said: eight children who do not speak Italian. Meloni, on the other hand, spoke of a maximum number of foreign students. These are two different categories.

Marta: Precisely because it exists, it needs to be properly assessed. Giuseppe Valditara has referred to the 30 per cent cap already set out in a 2010 circular. However, the same circular allows this limit to be exceeded when students possess adequate language skills and, conversely, to be lowered when their knowledge of Italian is insufficient.

Luca: This is the strongest part of your argument. If the law meant that a child who’d just arrived from Bangladesh shouldn’t be placed in a centre with twenty other newly arrived children, I’d agree with you. However, why should I place him in the same category as a Romanian girl born in Bologna, who speaks Italian better than I do but does not have citizenship?

Marta: Because a law must have verifiable criteria.

Luca: Temperature is also verifiable. However, I would not use it to form classes. Knowledge of Italian, time spent in the education system, and possibly social background: these are the factors that truly affect teaching.

Marta: And who assesses Italian? Do we sit an exam at the age of six? The merit of the cap is that it forces the administration to take notice of a problem that everyone otherwise merely observes without resolving it.

Luca: The risk is that, in an attempt to resolve a linguistic concentration, you end up creating a bureaucratic one. There are around 950,000 students who are not Italian citizens – just over 11 per cent – and around two-thirds were born in Italy. Calling them all ‘foreigners’ describes their passport, not necessarily their school experience.

Marta: If we wait for the perfect solution, we’ll never get anything done. Segregation exists in certain schools: families who can choose leave, whilst those who cannot stay.

Luca: But tell me, how do you apply the 30 per cent rule in a neighbourhood where 50 or 60 per cent of the students are foreign nationals?

Marta: You distribute them.

Luca: Where? What if neighbouring schools have the same problem? So a seven-year-old has to travel across the city because he has the wrong passport?

Marta: Therefore, we propose free transport, incentives and agreements between institutions. However, it is not acceptable to concentrate them merely because distribution is difficult.

Luca: I’m not going to tell you that. What I am saying is that the solution must address segregation, not nationality.

Marta: Nationality often highlights the issue.

Luca: ‘Often’ does not mean ‘always’. One person may hold Moroccan citizenship, have been born in Modena and attended school entirely in Italy; another may hold Italian citizenship, have grown up abroad and speak very little Italian. If the criterion is the passport, the first person counts towards the quota and the second does not. From an educational point of view, this makes no sense.

Marta: Therefore, we will exclude from the count anyone who was born here or attended school here.

Luca: Perfect. At that point, you admitted that the problem wasn’t foreigners.

Marta: I have acknowledged that we need to clearly identify which students have specific needs.

Luca: Which is exactly what I’m saying.

Marta: School, however, isn’t just about learning your times tables. It’s about building a community. If one group becomes the vast majority in a class, integration can be more difficult, even if the children speak Italian.

Luca: First it was language, now it’s identity. If we’re talking about pluralism, however, that’s another matter altogether.

And this is where the debate really begins. Both acknowledge that certain concentrations of pupils can lead to segregation and language difficulties, but also that ‘foreigner’ is too broad a category to automatically equate with an educational need. Marta wants a strict rule because she fears that, without a binding requirement, integration will remain dependent on the goodwill of schools that are already overburdened. Luca, on the other hand, fears that citizenship will become a shortcut for labelling young people who have no language problems as a problem in their own right.

Marta: So you’d do away with any cap?

Luca: No. I would cap the concentration of pupils with special educational needs, particularly those relating to language, and invest in Italian as a second language, support staff, full-time schooling and transport. Schools are shaped by the city’s geographical layout.

Marta: Lovely. It’s expensive.

Luca: Even relocating thousands of children costs money. Provided you don’t start with the wrong word.

Meloni’s political strategy boils down to this. She takes a real problem – classes in which integration can become more difficult because too many vulnerabilities are concentrated in the same place – and translates it into a much simpler message: Italian children must not become a minority, she said when announcing the measure. The simplicity of this message, however, raises a question.

What do we really want to restrict: foreigners, or the conditions that make teaching and learning difficult?

Because if the problem is the passport, the solution is simple: just count. If the problem is integration, we need to distinguish. Distinguish between those who do not know the language and those born here, educational difficulties and nationality, social concentration and background, the young person who has just arrived and the young person for whom Italy is not a destination but a place of birth. The 30 per cent figure can therefore be a point for discussion. But before counting foreigners, we need to understand who we are counting.