"La educacion no va a pagar la europa del capital"
Ateneinrivolta's editorial
It's been 10 years now since Bologna process began in Europe, and in Wien its anniversary is being celebrated: we will let noone celebrate!
In 19th of june 1999, 30 european and ex soviet education ministers ratified in Bologna a plan of harmonization of the european higher education, in order to go along with managing class’ wishes.
After that, in Italy, Berlinguer and Zecchino reform introduced two levels of degree: it was the first application of the Bologna Process in Europe. Then many further steps took place, as the attempted Moratti’s reform in 2005, law 133 and its cuts and now imminent Gelmini’s reform.
Managing class had always known the instruments to destroy public and mass university. Before the '90, the first experiment to introduce two different degree levels was Gui’s law stopped by student movement in 1968. Malfatti tried again in 1977.
Those victories, early forgotten, came along with the birth of the mass university and “strengthen†it: mass university was a contradiction in a society with promoted capitalism. This “universal knowledge machinery†offered critical thought and culture, created social mobility, fed individual and collective projects of liberation and emancipation. It was a workshop to claim rights and to elaborate alternative models. It was not useful, expensive and dangerous. Mass university was no more compatible with the working model, founded on precariousness and mobility, in this production system students had to learn how to became precarious.
This is the logic of the Bologna process and after ten years we can find it in all the university reforms, which has been following one after another. This goal came with other measures that changed public university: privatizations, externalizations, cuts to students’ rights, lack of quality in didactic and research. The killing blow is Gelmini reform which is going to be approved. It allows external members, like public corporations, institutions and companies, to join the board of directors, the socalled “management councilâ€. It also removes researchers with permanent job and replaces houses, refectories and subsidies for all the students with a private fund only for “deserving†students, namely those who have better gradings.
This replacement come with endless cuts, that did not allow the distribution of these services. This is a further instrument to select and exclude students from a free admittance to university.
Is it possible to imagine meritocracy in a system based on selection, differentation, disequality?
We are fighting for a real students’ right and for qualified didactics. We will carry on this struggle connecting local resistance, figthing against each increase of the taxes, partecipating to the management of the budget and the planning of the formative path, reclaiming free books, houses, refectories for the students, free public transports, reductions on books, theaters, cinemas, museums, in order to allow everybody to choose his formative path regardless his economic situation.
Selection also goes trought a different quality of academic programs. In this way we have universities created only for research: different levels of quality, which creates different levels in the working class. We have a permanent education, two levels of degrees, stages, masters, to acquire specific knowlege for working system.
The student is the product for local market, with a just-in-time knowledge. But he isn’t like a washing machine or a car: he is not everlasting. He's like a cell phone: just one water drop in the gear and you have to change it.
This situation got worse with the introduction of the credit system, the fragmentation of knowledge, a permanent, poor, dequalified education.
The introduction of the credit system was the main instrument that made education misurable. Credits are used to make an equivalency between hours of study - or numbers of pages to study - and any other activity, like those one has to do in an apprenticeship.
Also research has totally changed its form: it is no more financed but now connected with business profits, focused only on immediatly productive, patented sectors; it is no more a tool for aware collective development. As a result of this in the last 30 years italian technological innovation was almost inexistant.
Current university is not able to analise our society, to be connected with its changing and phenomenons; we can see this also in the last students’ movements, in which they were incapable to connect themselves with other struggles, for example ambientalistic or working class ones.
In Italy primary school is also an instrument for racialist selection with divided classes for migrants and different courses for different places of origin.
These are the reasons why we consider didactics a central point in our student struggles. University has to produce culture, by qualified education, by connecting all the actors of the university -teachers, students, researchers -, by talking about society and its events. University has to go back being protagonist in the society, promoting a dialogue between all studing disciplines.
Students partecipation is the central key to create a social university: partecipation means active decisions in the university management. To do this we propose seminaries, called “controcorsiâ€, that make a critical analysis of the society, in order to influence ordinary didactics. In each faculty we will have to discuss about economic crysis, ambiental matters, gender thematics, racialist exploitation and precariousness. Seminaries organized by students, researchers and teachers, to influence and change official didactic and to take off credit system hinges.
Our purpose is to connect all the struggles that resist to privatization and destruction of public school and university, to claim public and high quality education, in a social university and school.
We also know that our struggle is not enought by itself: in our society we can see endless attacks to people’s rights and common goods, health, welfare, home right, free culture and public education. This is the reason why we try to connect with workers fighting for their jobs, precarious workers, migrants fighting against racial exploitation, people fighting against nuclear or burning stations, defending their health and territories.
We reject university privatization, but also every other attempt of privatistic management of common good, like public water, they are trying to use like control and oppression tool all around the world.
A TOTAL ATTACK NEEDS A GLOBAL REVOLT!
