However, let us first see how education is structured. The most presti-gious secondary education is represented by the liceo (theoretical high school). This is seen as ideal among middle and higher classes in Grano as it gives their children the highest chances of entering a university.8 Things become complicated when parents have to choose between the two main educational paths: liceo classico (humanist) or liceo scientifico (scientific). Liceo classico bears the weight of being the oldest secondary school in Italy and, until 1969, it was the only school that granted access to university.9 Much of its prestige comes from being specialised in sub-jects extremely respected in Italian society: history, philosophy, Latin and ancient Greek, which prepare students for distinguished careers in the humanities and jurisprudence. In contrast, liceo scientifico focuses on sciences, languages and, since the 1990s, also computer science and information technology.10 Thus it has built a reputation for preparing stu-dents for scientific universities in particular and, implicitly, for good but not necessarily prestigious jobs, such as engineering and IT. It is the liceo
classico that is considered by many to really ‘open the mind and vision’
and prepare students for understanding the world.
Further down the ladder are the technical and vocational schools which educate most of the qualified working class in Italy. As the direc-tor of the vocational school in Grano put it, ‘here is where the students that remain come [after the other secondary schools have filled their places]’, including students with behavioural problems and with low educational performance. Nevertheless, with more than 800 students, the vocational school is the biggest secondary school in Grano and the less advantaged people from the whole region see it as the only place where their children can learn a mestiere (profession) that hopefully will some day turn into a lavoro (job). Thus this school accommodates students from very different social and economic backgrounds and with very different prospects for the future.
The vocational school was also where a policy for regulating mobile phone use within the perimeter of the school was most difficult to reinforce.11 The main reason was that many students and parents advo-cated their right to be in touch with each other at any time. One teacher exasperatedly told me the story of a mother who called her son during class to ask him how he wanted his pasta because she remembered that somebody in the family did not eat what she had planned that morn-ing to prepare for lunch. For teachers these are unnecessary intrusions, while for some students and parents this sense of being in permanent contact can be highly important. Most parents who send their children to vocational school know that, in fact, after completing their studies, their children will largely rely on their families and not on the schools to find jobs in the region. So, despite teachers’ advice, students do heavily rely on social media for study and many parents encourage this, even if it means breaching major school rules: for example, by exchanging homework via WhatsApp or finding solutions on the internet to virtually any problem.
A similar restriction placed on teachers, concerning their right to be in constant contact with their family, was resented by the younger teachers at the liceo scientifico, when the head teacher tried to ban the use of mobile phones by teachers during classes, despite knowing that this ban was in line with a government order set in place in 1998.12 Some agreed that such a rule makes sense for the students as the receptors of the education, while the teachers felt that they had learned enough by adulthood and had gained an entitlement to use their mobile phones at any time. Like the students in the vocational school, teachers were now claiming the right to be in contact with their families in urgent
situations. Therefore the conflict seems to be less about opposing sides, and more about everyone wanting to be on the same side, that is to be allowed to use mobile technology at all times, regardless of their social roles as teacher or student. This reflects a deeper clash between diver-gent views on the role of public education: many teachers are trying to
(a)
(b)
Fig. 6.1 Box where students are required to leave their mobile phones at the beginning of class (a); files prepared by staff on students using mobile phone cameras during school time (b)
maximise the effectiveness of their teaching and wanting the students’
undivided attention during class, while students and their parents see that formal education is simply a part of a whole situation where educa-tion at school and at home, as well as tradieduca-tional forms of solidarity, are all equally important.
In this context, most parents think the multitude of practices and interactions outside the formal education system are essential for their children’s future. In particular, they see social media as enhancing their children’s chances in life: they improve results at school, give children networking skills and access to information the schools cannot offer and enforce peer networks which might prove essential someday. Social media also link young people up to a sort of ‘modernity’ to which many aspire. All these ideas are probably expressions of the fact that Grano is a relatively small place and the family is of dominant importance.
However, more than half of the Italian population live in places with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants.13 We have seen that in Grano ‘good’ par-ents put a great deal of effort into raising their children and, in the case of the middle classes, this includes complementing school education by practicing sport, mainly football for boys, and Taekwondo and volley-ball for everybody, as well as in some cases private tutoring in English, the sciences and different arts such as singing, dancing and drama.
Parents see these activities as being just as mandatory as eating bread or watching television news. They are an intrinsic part of education, as a prime commodity that a good family has to offer their children.
The huge gap between home and school education is also reflected by a recent report that showed that 65 per cent of Italian families with at least one child have a computer at home, while on average there are just six computers for every 100 students in Italian schools.14 In my own household survey, 70 per cent of households had at least one notebook or PC which was used as a family device, rather than as a personal one.
These figures show that much of the children’s IT education is happen-ing at home rather than at school, and imply that parents from higher social and economic backgrounds can better transmit computing skills to their children. Many people contrast the importance of home educa-tion with the efficiency of public educaeduca-tion, which online is often pre-sented as the product of a corrupt and inefficient system.
These two memes had been posted on Facebook by two young women: the first had been shared by a mother from a popular satiri-cal Facebook page.15 It received 32 ‘likes’ and 18 comments, which was double the average response for her postings. The second meme had
(a)
(b)
Fig. 6.2 Memes shared by people in Grano.
The first meme (a) reads: ‘When a German doesn’t know thing . . . they learn it/ When an American doesn’t know some-thing . . . they pay to learn it/ When an Englishman doesn’t know something . . . they bet on it/ When a Frenchman doesn’t know some-thing . . . they pretend to know it/ When a Spaniard doesn’t know something . . . they ask someone to explain it/ When a Greek doesn’t know something . . . they challenge you on who is right/ When an Irish man doesn’t know something . . . he drinks on it/ When a Swiss doesn’t know something . . . he studies it/ When an Italian doesn’t know some-thing . . . he teaches it !!!’ The second meme (b) reads: ‘But what do you all have against me? I am just one of the many pigs who made a career in Italy.’
been shared by a teenager student under the brief comment: ‘This time even Peppa is right.’16 The post received 12 ‘likes’ and was commented on four times. We should note that Peppa Pig has a particular position in Grano: it is hated by many adults, among whom it has the reputation of being irritating and filthy, while it is quite popular among children.
Some mothers refer to her as: ‘that annoying naughty piglet’ because its character clashes with a few fundamental values: a certain order and cleanliness, a certain way to follow and obey your parents, including being less autonomous. Peppa Pig and her brother George are always challenging their parents and escaping their control, which is unaccept-able for many parents in Grano.
Now, as we see in Chapter 3, people use social media to reflect in a subtle way on the higher political economy of the state. They can openly criticise political and economic structures or can use a meme to point out different issues they find intolerable in their society. If in poli-tics this is most visible and can be exploited in moments of maximum intensity, such as during electoral campaigns or political crises, pub-lic education is perceived as a far more rigid system that many people feel it is useless to engage with. For example, young people in Grano who are qualified as school teachers hesitate to apply for teaching posi-tions because they see the process to obtain a permanent position as being too complex and not very transparent. This means that, on the one hand, people feel trapped by social rules about, for example, which high school they should go to or what profession they should learn. On the other hand, many see the safest escape from this trap of choosing the correct training route is to rely on their existing personal networks and become more connected, including by means of digital and internet technology.
At the same time, a collective value means individuals do not criticise members of the community in public. For example, people never discuss or challenge their children’s teachers on Facebook, even if they feel extremely upset by the way they are teaching.
Instead people displace all these issues by focusing on matters a con-siderable distance away from Grano: they might be angry about the high rate of unemployment in Italy, the failure of central government to create employment, injustices in recent work legislation, corrup-tion or preferential practices to obtain employment.17 It is acceptable to criticise the Italian state and its actions and, sometimes, distant issues are seen as much safer than very specific local ones. What peo-ple criticise are not concrete cases, but rather ideals that the Italian state fails to meet.