Italy’s education system

Dividing it into four parts, Italy’s primary education is excellent; secondary education is poor; tertiary (university) is utterly dreadful and post graduate pretty well non-existent.

So it is not surprising the Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini should have put so much effort into university reforms. Her efforts have been treated to a wave of quite disgraceful violence with police cars burnt, banks broken into, police officers and members of the public injured. Market traders have had to shut their stalls for fear that the ranting mob should overrun them. I looked at the nervous faces of the carabinieri, many drafted up from the country and not used to city streets, and thought of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s comment in 1968 that the police, sons of the people, had been attacked by the students, sons of the bourgeoisie.

But now the Gelmini reforms have passed and are law. Many useless courses at minor universities will no longer qualify for funding, and the professors’ grip on their offices, many into their 80s, which so stifles emerging talent, will end. No Italian university is in the top 250 in the world rankings (Britain has three in the top ten). It is not lack of talent: often you read of a breakthrough in science or medicine by Italian researchers, but always at a foreign university. Italy desperately needs centres of excellence to attract the high flyers into staying. These reforms, so bitterly objected to by the ‘Black Block’ international rentamob, are a beginning down that path, and those, like me, who criticise Berlusconi for doing nothing, should allow him to chalk one up.