Commentary
Are we teachers the enemy of the family?
Education Minister Valditara can insist all he wants that his decree “does not deny sex education to anyone.” In reality, he is taking it away precisely from the families who do not dare to talk about it.
There was a moment – about five years ago – when we teachers suddenly felt important again. Do you remember? Because of a very dangerous virus, schools of all levels had been closed for a few weeks.
Then intellectuals and politicians of all stripes began calling for the return of in-person schooling, treating it a fundamental bulwark of civilization. Some even went so far as to distort statistics to show that opening the schools would not increase contagion: or perhaps a little, but not that much, and in any case it would be worth it. Children needed school much more than we all needed health. And it had to be real schools, made of brick and mortar, with slate blackboards and chalk: a virtual simulacrum would not work. Although everything can now be done online, that’s not true for school: school needs to take your children off your hands at around 8 a.m. and return them in the afternoon.
It was a complicated but exciting time, when perhaps many of my teacher colleagues deluded themselves into thinking they had regained a modicum of dignity in the public eye. And if school was really so important, perhaps governments would decide to give it proper funding again.
Five years later, it’s clear that none of that happened. We notice this every day as we join in the scattered strikes that the unions are unable to organize on the same day. They have cut our salaries, even if you can’t tell because the amount on our paychecks has increased slightly: however, the “teacher bonus” has been frozen since September, an accounting trick that makes us suspect the government is frantically looking for any means to scrape together resources.
There is not much talk about that in the newspapers. For a month, the most talked-about news item has been the family who, rather than sending their children to school, left them in the woods, at the mercy of wild animals and poisonous mushrooms. Many “independent thinkers” praised their choice – even though it was apparent that they were the same people who four years ago urged us to reopen the schools immediately because the mental health of the children was at stake.
Meanwhile, the Chamber of Deputies has passed a bill prohibiting us from providing sex education or emotional education without parental consent. There is a cultural battle going on, and we are a target simply because we’re doing our job, or at least we’re trying to. We find ourselves cast as the enemies of the institution of the family, which is supposed to have the final say on the sexuality of its children. As happens in battle, there is a big difference between the propaganda – spicy anecdotes about lessons given by drag queens and porn actors – and the situation on the ground. In reality, kids are educating themselves about sex by living together in the same environments for five hours a day – with unsatisfactory results, as experts tell us that sexually transmitted diseases are on the rise among the youngest demographics.
So when I ask myself what society wants from me, the answer is the same: to take their children off their hands at 8 a.m. and return them in the afternoon. The fact that for these four or five hours they find themselves together, in classrooms that are not too spacious, in contact with peers of different sexes and cultures, is a knot I have to untangle by myself, knowing that at any moment I may have to be called to account before their parents.
Can I take my students to visit a counseling center? Only if the parents approve. And I will have to organize another activity at no cost for the students who will stay behind at school: the law forces me to do so, but doesn’t allocate a dime of funding for that. They’ll be sitting on a sofa fooling around, and maybe some will learn something. Very often, the parents who refuse to sign the consent form are those who come from backgrounds where adolescent sexuality is a taboo.
Education Minister Valditara can insist all he wants that his decree “does not deny sex education to anyone.” In reality, he is taking it away precisely from the families who do not dare to talk about it; from the children who live in abusive families who will never sign that consent form; from the girls whose parents have already arranged a marriage for them (yes, that does happen, much more often than the newspapers report); and from the boys who live in a violent environment and don’t have the tools to manage their anger. Is this what society is asking of me, without having the courage to spell it out?
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/noi-insegnanti-i-nemici-dellistituzione-famigliare on 2025-12-04