Grey Power

The Economist tackle the issue of Italy's education system breakdown (may require subscription)

The biggest fault in Italian education is that there are too many old teachers

Since 2000 successive reports from the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment have shattered the belief that Italian schools are among Europe's best. The most recent put them near the bottom of the heap. In maths Italy's 15-year-olds were outperformed by their peers in all but three OECD countries. Almost a third were “unable to display the minimum level of mathematics proficiency needed to succeed in their professional and private life”. The share of young adults with essential qualifications was far below the OECD average.

No similarly exhaustive comparison has been done for tertiary education. But that so many young Italians study abroad, and so few young foreigners (2% of all foreign students) do in Italy, points to equally low standards at university level.

All of this sounds sadly true to me.

If I have to judge on the limited sample of high school students which I get to talk to (my youngest brother) , I can see the huge divide with what I was taught to, often by the very same professors (thirteen years apart, we shared the same math teacher). Even taking into account differences in personal attitude, the rest must be ascribed to decreasing quality of education.

We must find a way to fix this. I will certainly not be one of the meagerly-paid high school teacher for Italy's new path to education. 1100 Euros/month to tackle 25 teen-agers day after day is pretty close to my idea of Hell.