Italian schools and institutions fail tolerance test
Italy is most recently not quite a good place to stay for immigrants and minorities: during the latter years the local press was dotted with several articles related to crimes committed by immigrants and/or people residing in the country with no legal permission. In a rather emphasized manner, a strong attention has been put on the origins of the criminals rather than on the facts themselves. This had a very negative effect on the Italian people, which are becoming ever more xenophobic, especially towards Muslims and in those cities which have high amounts of foreigner residents.
In June 2007 the Italian magazine "Donna Moderna" published the results of a survey conducted nationwide in order to understand the Italian’s image regarding immigrants and foreigners in their country. Starting from statistics almost one third of interviewed people think immigrants in Italy are about 5 millions, whereas official sources show about 3.5 million immigrants, out of which nearly 600.000 are illegals. The survey also revealed the quite foggy idea people have of the difference between immigrants and illegals, since 13% of interviewed people consider all immigrants as illegals, and another 75% thinks illegals are about a half of the immigrant population. 60% of interviewed people also think that less than one half of all immigrants have a job (but as of October 11 2007, a survey conducted by the Italian Ministry of Internal Affairs shows that nearly 75% of immigrants in Italy do have a job), and then, besides the evergreen prejudices there come also mistrust, fear and in some cases even hatred, leaving not enough space to an open attitude towards new people and cultures (55% of interviewed people did show an open attitude towards immigrants, but many of them were at the same time mistrustful). The real situation does not differ much from the result of the survey, - it only gets a little worse, involving all fields of everyday life, including schools, a place where children should learn such words and concepts as multiethnicity, tolerance and mutual understanding, and first of all, the place where future generations grow. Despite the ever increasing number of foreign students in public italian schools, integration has still a long way to go.
From North to South, all over the country the problems remain the same: it is either the italian parents complaining about the presence of immigrants in the classrooms or the italian children themselves isolate the foreigners and make fun of them, but sometimes even the schools and single teachers help with making the situation a little worse: it is definitely the case for the Giovanni Pascoli intermediate school in Brescia, one of the country's most industrialized cities whose immigrants account for 13% of its total population. Towards the end of November 2006, teacher Anna Faroni conducted a survey on her own initiative "to stimulate frank and open discussion on the themes of immigration and integration". The survey, entitled "Inquiry into Islam" was given only to the Muslim students of the school, containing a few questions such as "According to you, what is a good Muslim like?", "What does the word 'integralist' mean to you?" and "Give a synonim for Italy". What already shows the signs of discrimination is the fact that only the Muslim community was asked to answer the questions, but what really made this become a big issue was the fact that there were no chances for open answers. Namely the only answers available to the question "What does the word 'integralist' mean to you?" were as follows:
A - Using violence in order to convince those who have a different opinion
B - Imposing muslim culture
Needless to say that as soon as the kids' parents and the local Muslim community found out about that, the whole city was thrown into chaos again, after only three months earlier it had been the sad setting of a tremendous chain of isolated crimes which brutally killed 7 people in only 17 days, involving immigrants as the killers of 3 out of the 7 total victims. The kids' parents jointly with Sajad Hussain, founder of the cultural association Muhammadiah, denounced that survey as "malicious" and "stuffed with racial prejudices and islamophobia". "We refuse the equation: Muslim=Integralist=Danger towards Italy" said Sajad Hussain, and confirmed that " true integration starts especially from public schools, where our children can make continuous comparisons with different lifestyles in a genuine way, in the way only kids can do, thus giving birth to the real multiculturality". Nino Mazzarella, the school headmaster declared that that survey had been a big mistake and begged both the local Muslim community and the cultural association Muhammadiah for pardon, and so did the teacher by sending to all the kids' parents a letter in which she confirmed that after the blood-stained month of August in Brescia she could sense "too much tension and bad mood among the students of the class, half of which are foreigners", so in order to "stimulate frank and open discussion on the themes of immigration and integration" she tried to discover what the general prejudices were, and eventually tried to figure out what the Muslim point of view was "by using the same terms newspapers nowadays use", but in no way did she mean to seem racist, she claimed.
Of course Brescia is not the only place where the immigrants find it hard to integrate well in the local community, and sometimes the immigrant community is not left alone to experience discrimination and segregation: moving from Brescia, one of Italy's northenmost provinces, and heading South to Ragusa (Sicily), Italy's southernmost province, problems dealing with integration arised for an Italian 13 year-old boy with intellectual disabilities.
All of the disabled's classmates were not allowed to go to school by their parents for almost a week in February 2007, after the boy allegedly showed aggressive behaviour towards both students and teachers. "The case is not at all simple - explained National ANFFAS (National Association of Families with Intellectually/Physically Disabled Members) President Roberto Speziale - because it is the schooling institution which should have taken care of arranging special care for the disabled student, without coming to such points. Furthermore, any student can be well integrated, regardless of handicap type or level: I neither want to blame all the parents who decided to organize this 'strike', nor I want to see this young disabled boy segregated. There is a way to leave the class as it was, by preparing the teachers to provide him with special help."
But eventually the Tribunal for Minors of Catania decided to impose the boy's family to bring him to school in appropriate structures equipped for his case. At that point his mother, Antonietta Grut Recchimurzo, decided to sue both the State and the intermediate school "Vann'Antò" for discrimination and segregation, in addition to a seperate sue for a teacher who, in the presence of other students, slapped the boy in the face. And for the time being, before the trial takes place, the boy is "left alone" with his disabilities.
One month later, once again in the province of Ragusa, teacher Rosalba Busacca found herself alone with her schoolkids fighting against a wave of pure racism which affected the "Filippo Traina" primary school in the town of Vittoria.
The parents of three children asked the school headmaster to either change their kids' class or to send the immigrants away to another school because "they smell bad".
Headmaster Angela Riolo did not send anybody away, but the Italian children were allowed to change classes, in order to get in a class without foreign students.
In brief, three Romanians and one Indian just joined that class, and some of them lived in such desperate conditions that had problems in keeping good hygienical conditions, a problem dealing with the lack of decent accommodation. Besides, they were not familiar with the language and for this reason the other children automatically isolated them. But this did not worry Rosalba, who asked for some volunteer help in order to establish extra hours during which the children could learn Italian and take care of their personal hygiene - not enough for some parents, who decided to move their kids to other classes instead of understanding the problem and helping the integration of these children. Fortunately many other parents supported Rosalba and her fight for integration, while Giuseppe Nicosia, Mayor of Vittoria, started inquiries which might be leading to legal proceedings against discriminating attitudes and policies.
Such demonstrations of xenophobia apparently do not remind the Italian people of the several decades of Italian emigration (which hasjust slowed down recently but never stopped), such racist attitudes and malicious prejudices probably do not recall the way Italians were discriminated abroad, or whenever Italian criminality gets world-famous (most recently, the Duisburg carnage) the press suddenly seems to focus more on other cases, the more they deal with criminal immigrants, the better.
Fortunately there are not only bad news, and much more fortunately it is now almost one year that the European Commission has taken the Calini Primary School as a model: the Calini Primary School is in Brescia, exactly in the city which often saw violent outbursts of racism and violence against immigrants as well as crimes committed by immigrants.
At first many people thought establishing a multiethnic school in Brescia would not have worked, but they eventually had to change their minds: in this school, 50% of the students are not Italian, and thanks to a huge variety of extra courses children are used to spend almost the whole day alltogether at school, having fun and learning much more than they would do in an ordinary school. By focusing right from the very first day of school on multiculturality, multiethnicity and on the concept of belonging to the same community, children learn fast how to communicate with one another regardless of origins and religions, because they have a genuine interest in getting to know other traditions without being spoiled by any prejudices nor feelings of xenophobia, since their school makes them part of the same community, and provides them with multilingual study materials which will facilitate them in learning new languages and/or in maintaining their mothertongues.
This good example of tolerance and peaceful coexistence together with the very recent news about the regions Veneto and Sardinia very shortly to launch several projects dedicated to the better integration of immigrants starting right from schooling and social assistance, and last but not least, the commitment lately showed by the Ministry of Internal Affairs towards building a much more efficient network of information and assistance for residence permits and family reconjunction visas makes hope for a more tolerant, well integrated society, even though for the time being Italian institutions did not do enough to make true integration a reality.
