The Italian language and school in Italy today: a controversial relationship at the origin of new political dynamics?

Abstract

There is something wrong when even information, which should be beyond parties, contributes to abuses and manipulation of language, the deepening of divisions, increasing marginalization, and certain popular yet negative national attitudes. This is alarming when schools themselves are somehow complicit in this tendency, given that under Article 34 of the Constitution of the Italian Republic, schools are institutions open to all and must stand for the removal of obstacles to learning and for the free and full development of all people without distinctions of any kind. This article tries to investigate how much certain factors like the peculiar “fetishism of degrees” (Tullio De Mauro), the denigration of Gianni Rodari-like linguistical experimentalism, the impermeability to plurilingualism, intended also as “linguistical democracy” for De Mauro, may influence and interfere with the impoverishment of Italian common and public speech with a sort of “school elitism” and a mass devaluation of culture combined with the extremization of political parties.