Young Italians and the importance of education

After family, teachers are the people that most influence the formation of our kids, both in terms of competencies as well as character. They are the people who know how to turn the pages of a book into knowledge, and breathe life into an argument making it interesting, as well as enrich and form the futures of their students. It’s very likely, in fact, that even your future will be marked by encounters with professors capable of stimulating your love for a particular subject, rendering it unique, magical, and worthy of exploration.
Although teachers are the pulsating heart of Italian schools— they hold the power to form, educate, and transmit information to our children— until today, there was no reward system, other than the admiration of other students and parents.
Politics is myopic; it doesn’t see that investing in education and culture not only pays well for a long time, but it is an effective investment in times of crisis, because ideas and innovation change the world’s paradigms, not conformism and mediocracy.
In choosing one’s course of study, the type of school and teachers’ reputations are crucial, but are frequently not given their deserved importance.
The state’s persistent structural inability to plan for Italy’s future and employment requirements has lent greater importance to specializations, options, courses, and possibilities in which the basic concept is always one thing: students need to be educated within specialized schools that offer more options, so as to address global labor demands. These days, the ability of teachers to influence the educational process is getting small and smaller, and the students’ ability to escape the routine is almost nonexistent. The system is not only self-referencing, but also pretends to understand the complexity of the world years in advance, without the slightest possibility of error. But teaching doesn’t happen in parliament, it happens in the schools.
My point is the teaching is not mechanical matter of cause and effect. Rather, it is something human, built upon relationships, and therefore, by definition, very subjective.
There are no systems in the world that are better than their teachers: as hindered and limited as they are by Italy’s absurd bureaucracy, they are the true engineers of our schools.
In the end, the important consideration when choosing a school and teachers, is the possibility to learn. Ending up in a classroom with a teacher who teaches his subject is not enough: what counts is that he knows how to make you learn. Teaching and learning are correlated, but the latter is not always a consequence of the former. This is why it’s important to try and understand who your professors will be and which stimuli they will offer. Education is not a question of control and command, but of an environment that needs to give you tools and the chance at a better future.