“We must teach children at school that, however confident you are, one must be willing to recognize that he has perhaps wrong if the reasons of the opponents are stronger”. He writes like this Marco Santambrogio, gito Professor of philosophy of language at the University of Parma and the University San Raffaele of Milan, in his latest book entitled Philosophy and history, seen by a partial philosopher full of prejudices, published by La Nave di Teseo. So ready to discuss (and to question), Professor Santambrogio, founding partner of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy (Esap) and the Italian Society of Analytical Philosophy (SIFA), has reviewed the New indications 2025. School of‘childhood and first cycle of education. Materials for the public debate of the Ministrythe last guidelines for the teachers of the Belpaese schools, from childhood to middle, born, as stated in the title, with the aim of generating points of view.
Professor, what impression did he have completed?
«I read, with some effort. First of all, the composite character of the writing affects. It is true, as the architects say, that a camel is a horse designed by a committee! The steps of bureaucratic prose alternate that discourages anyone who is not in charge of the works, the attempts of prophetic poetry – “If men are not given the opportunity to find out what they have done and are doing the world in which they live, they could walk in the darkness and find themselves in the face of the frightening consequences of their activities” (page 12) – the philosophers from amateurs and simply ridiculous affirmations: “teachers have the duty to know potential of the IA “. Why don’t they explain them to them, the potential of the IA? ».
Are there parts that are saved?
«There is no shortage of parts written in a composed and professional prose. One example: the paragraph “fields of experience: speeches and words”. Anyone who wrote it should have been an example and it was not. “
Marco Santambrogio
From form we move on to the substance. And in particular to its sector of competence, history.
«Some time ago a booklet by Ernesto Galli della Loggia and Loredana Perla was released, teaching Italy. A proposal for compulsory school. The authors exhibit a particular conception of the objectives that should be given the entire area of education in our country. In their own words: “If the school has to serve to form good citizens” it must teach “Italy, its history, its geography, its culture. In a word, its identity”. These positions are well recognizable in the pages of 2025 indications dedicated to teaching history. It is stated, as if they were obvious things, that the story is responsible for the task not only to tell the facts, but even to explain the sense of the world and the genealogy of morality: the story “represented a decisive page of the way as has been built not only our understanding of the world but our own awareness of good and evil” (p. 69). And again: “In the culture of the West, the story has become, and has remained to date, the arena par excellence where Post Factum face the asset and evil variously understood. Where the exploits of the individuals of individuals and peoples remains, and in some way their final destiny is carried out: a sort of unappealable court of humanity”. But really? Isn’t it a bit risky? ».
C‘It is therefore a historicist perspective, a thought orientation that reports every human manifestation at the concrete historical moment and the environment in which it emerged, which would therefore open up to relativism, to the questioning of any form of religion. Correctly express him, in his opinion, to theInterior of guidelines intended for the whole teaching staff?
«First of all, not all of them are historicists, neither in Italy nor elsewhere. Catholic thought, of course, is not. And secondly – this seems to me the crucial point – with what right a ministerial text imposes on all Italian boys a very particular conception of the world? And then, who is the right to establish what the identity of the Italians is, also assuming that the notion makes sense (and does not have it)? ».
It is therefore a problem of merit but also of a method.
“More generally, it seems to me that those who take on the task of writing these indications on behalf of the Ministry also assumes the responsibility of any public official, who cannot try to promote or impose their particular conceptions and must instead remain within the limits of what all citizens could in principle share. It seems clear to me that Galli della Loggia’s ideas and Perla are difficult to reconcile, for example, with the beliefs shared by all Catholics. Catholics are not exactly a minority in Italy, but even if they were, even if they were only four cats, they would still have the right to be respected above all as regards the principles to which the primary education of their children must be held ».
What, however, should the ministerial text have to say?
“Much better would have made these indications if they had limited themselves to suggesting, for example, to” develop adequate exposure capacity. Knowing how to expose in a lexically adequate form, orally or in writing, their historical knowledge “and to insist on the importance of” memorizing dates, knowing the salient events and correctly place them on the relative geomotic cards “. These seem to me to be sacrosanct indications, which deserve a serious public debate ».
