A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #18-26 - When Fascists Play Philosophers. National Guidelines for High Schools: Sloppiness and Ideology (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

On April 22, the Minister of Education and Merit published a draft of 
the new National Guidelines for High Schools, prompting numerous 
responses from the high school education community, the vast majority of 
which were critical. With this in mind, after a careful reading of these 
guidelines, we attempt to analyze them, focusing on the typical high 
school subjects, combined in the department of Philosophy and History. 
---- A warning for those less familiar with the mechanisms of writing 
government reforms: the statements of principle contained in the 
Preamble are largely acceptable, as were those of Renzi's Buona Scuola, 
as were and are those of all the preambles to every regulation that has 
worsened and worsens our lives. The logical fallacy is that of the 
inconsistency between means and ends, so often cited by Malatesta: 
objectives are declared to be shareable and positive, but means are 
proposed that make them impossible to achieve, or even sabotage them. Of 
course, amid so much that is shareable, there is always something that 
raises eyebrows: the ideology of merit and the primacy of skills, the 
apologia for the school-to-work process, some platitudes and unfounded 
claims about Artificial Intelligence, but the more interesting issues 
lie elsewhere.

First, let's clarify one point: based not only on various specific 
regulations but even on institutional provisions, ministerial guidelines 
can only be "indications" that are not binding on the specific 
curriculum of individual teachers. That said, ministerial guidelines 
have a dual value: first, they express an ideological orientation that, 
thanks to the communicative power of the broadcaster, is disseminated as 
a sort of manifesto; second, being a teacher does not automatically mean 
being aware of one's constitutional rights, and therefore, for some, 
these guidelines are perceived as binding ("Didn't they recommend 
Spinoza? Then I can't do it..."), and the associated ideological agenda 
is sometimes disseminated even by those who don't identify with them.

Let's analyze the proposals made for the traditional high school 
subjects: Philosophy and History. A general superficiality is 
immediately apparent: the premises, learning objectives, and knowledge 
are exactly the same for Classical, Scientific, Applied Sciences, 
Humanities, and Linguistics High Schools, despite the different subjects 
characterizing the various majors with which Philosophy and History are 
supposed to interact. I believe they made them generically and then 
copied and pasted them: if I were the minister, I would have given them 
only 20% of the agreed-upon salary. And it's not that it was a huge 
intellectual effort: it's intuitive, for anyone with even a passing 
knowledge of the subjects, that, for example, in an Applied Sciences 
High School, characterized by the engineering application of science and 
computer science, Philosophy, to best interact with such a major, should 
emphasize the logical aspect of its teaching, and History should 
emphasize the history of material life. But so it is, they didn't even 
try; However, apart from an intellectual superficiality, the thing could 
have an "ideological" sense, especially with regards to History.

Let's start with Philosophy. Here too, the premises are the standard 
ones we've long been accustomed to, perhaps with a slight emphasis on 
direct reading of the texts and the recommendation to address the 
thought of female philosophers. We've said that, in this type of 
guidance, the ideological aspect prevails: presences and absences, 
formulated by a political body, indicate the ideological preferences of 
the authors. What is clearly noticeable is a re-enactment of the 
Croce/Gentilian, liberal/fascist framework of philosophy-the perfect 
ideological synthesis of the current government.

A brief review: for Croce, philosophy is history because the Spirit can 
only be understood in its historical development; for Gentile, 
philosophy is action, and the history of philosophy is what contemporary 
thought recreates in its very making. In short, in both the liberal and 
fascist traditions, the history of philosophy is central to its study: 
it is no coincidence that in Italy, almost unique in the world, the 
study of its history rather than philosophy prevailed under fascism, 
and, after its fall, liberal-leaning governments reaffirmed this principle.

In recent decades, the historicist framework for the study of philosophy 
has often been questioned, especially through the idea of teaching by 
themes and/or a return to a purely theoretical, pre-Gentilian approach 
(logic, ethics, ontology). From the 1960s to the present, the debate has 
been cyclical, unresolved, and today a hybrid prevails: history + themes 
+ argumentation, without a unified model. The national guidelines thus 
appear to be a restoration of the Crocean/Gentilian model, or even more 
than the Gentile one: the guidelines' invitations to direct reading of 
texts are present in the Gentile Reform-the study of philosophy in the 
"history of philosophy manual" originated with the Crocean framework, 
especially in the post-war period. The vague references to analytic 
philosophy and formal logic are then explained as a necessary homage to 
the philosophy most practiced in the Anglo-Saxon world-if the work had 
begun now, in the relatively cool climate with the current US 
administration, perhaps it wouldn't even exist.

A look at the absences. The absences of Spinoza and Marx have been 
noted, and there's no point in explaining their ideological 
significance; I think it's more useful to explain the meaning of Kant's 
semi-repression, reduced solely to the meaning of the concept of 
"critique" and not to the content of the "Critiques." Indeed, the 
Critique of Practical Reason is the most radical point of Enlightenment 
moral thought: the only moral actions are those that have the form of 
universality-they must apply to every human being-and reciprocity-they 
must be considered as such whether they are performed or received. Civil 
laws, whatever they may be, from whatever source they come, that lack 
these characteristics are not moral and do not deserve respect.

Let's now turn to History: here things are even more peculiar. We 
encounter once again (it's not the first time this ministry has insisted 
on it) the primacy to be given to European/Western history. "It seems 
certain, for example, that the invention of the compass and gunpowder 
must be attributed to Chinese civilization: but who can doubt that it 
was their use by a civilization with a power, a religion, and a 
worldview entirely different from those of the Celestial Empire? Who can 
doubt that it was this use, not that invention, that changed the world?" 
Of course, we're talking about "diversity" and not "superiority": but we 
know how, in the culture of the new right, the concept of diversity is 
the crowbar with which to recover the worst of the past. In any case, 
the content indications are almost entirely missing from the rest of the 
planet; even Islam, geographical discoveries/conquests, colonialism, and 
imperialism are minimized.

Phenomenal, however, is a "didactic" justification for Western-centrism: 
no one could doubt the "(...) substantial impossibility of studying with 
even a minimal amount of depth the historical events of such a diverse 
group of peoples and civilizations on Earth. Teaching adolescents 
something even slightly significant (...) about the Japanese Empire and 
at the same time the kingdom of Dahomey, the Inca Empire in South 
America and at the same time the Islamic India of the Mughals, can only 
appear to be a desperate undertaking."

"Impossibility," "a desperate undertaking." To define the study of world 
history in this way in the National Guidelines is not a scientific 
assessment, but a symptom of a cultural approach that is, to put it 
mildly, very backward. These words betray the assumption that history 
can only be made locally, and that every place on Earth should limit 
itself to its own history and traditions-this too is a byproduct of the 
culture of the new right.

But this is simply not true. World history is a consolidated teaching 
practice in American, Australian, Canadian, Korean, Singaporean, 
Chinese, Japanese, and Indian schools: to say it's impossible is to 
ignore decades of research and teaching experience. Ministerial 
consultants must be aware of these facts: however, they are blinded by 
an ideological assumption, and I'm paying them a compliment.

Finally, according to ministerial guidelines, "it has long been 
customary to show a certain sufficiency for so-called political history, 
arguing that the study of the 'material' history of economics, 
technology, and nutrition should be preferred (...). However, in keeping 
with a well-established tradition, the national guidelines also firmly 
maintain, for high schools, the choice of indicating political history 
as the main path to approaching the study of the past." Consequently, in 
the guidelines, the learning objectives and expected skills are all 
geared not only to Western history, but only to political history.

Let's leave aside the term "tradition," which once again harks back to 
right-wing culture, and return to the copy-and-paste process that forces 
all high school curricula into a Procrustean bed: what sense does it 
make to reduce the "material history of economics, technology, and 
nutrition" to a bare minimum in a high school specializing in the 
humanities, applied sciences, etc.? Or, to return to the discussion of 
world history, to exclude this approach altogether from a high school 
specializing in languages?

In reality, the discourse here too is ideological: political history, 
"the internal organization of human communities, the ways of 
understanding the individual and the family, the use and characteristics 
of property and territorial settlement, the modes of power, its organs 
and responsibilities, the characteristics of relationships with other 
communities, and the specific ideal and symbolic apparatus that animates 
them," is, in fact, the history of the powerful. The history of the 
economy and material life, on the other hand, sheds light on the lives 
of ordinary people-but evidently, unlike the powerful, we are not worthy 
of history.

Enrico Voccia

https://umanitanova.org/quando-i-fascisti-fanno-i-filosofi-indicazioni-nazionali-per-i-licei-pressappochismo-e-ideologia/
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