Italy expressed alarm on Tuesday after an authoritative international report painted a grim picture of academic standards in its secondary schools.
The 57-nation study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development looked at the abilities of a sample of 15-year-olds in reading, science and mathematics.
Italy's students were among the tail-enders in the European Union and in the 30-nation OECD, behind countries such as Russia, Slovakia, Macao, Croatia and Poland.
Italian pupils were 33rd for reading, 36th for science and 38th in maths.
The report's authors acknowledged that standards in the country's traditionally elite 'licei' were above average but stressed that as a whole the study revealed ''a school system unable to cultivate excellence''.
The findings of the three-yearly OECD report were given prominent billing in the media, which noted how the Italian situation had apparently worsened since the last report in 2004.
The Collapse of Italian Schools, headlined La Stampa, one of Italy's top dailies, adding in an editorial that: ''The nation's decline will be unstoppable unless the consequences of this emergency are clear to everyone''.
Education Minister Giuseppe Fioroni readily admitted that there was an ''education emergency'' but insisted that the report was an indictment of the system, not the students themselves.
''Our kids lack motivation, not intelligence or ability,'' he said.
Fioroni said a key problem in schools was the feeling that merit was not useful or important.
It was essential to change this so that schools could act as ''social elevators,'' he added, noting that the children of poor parents continued to fare worse at school than their more comfortably off peers.
The opposition UDC party called on the minister to hold a debate in parliament on the ''education crisis'', noting that the OECD report came amid other problems in schools, such as the apparently growing phenomenon of bullying and vandalism.
'MORTIFYING RESULTS'.
Meanwhile, there were howls of dismay from the business world over the OECD findings, seen as pointing to young people entering the labour market with ever lower abilities.
''The results are mortifying in themselves but they become even more so when you think that they are worse than in the last report,'' said Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, head of the industrialists' association Confindustria.
Francesco Scrima, schools spokesperson for the CISL labour union, called the report an ''alarming diagnosis, a red alert''.
He said urgent action was needed to ''make families, society and government much more attentive to schools than they have been for the last few decades''.
Maria Teresa Siniscalco, a prominent expert on Italy's education system, said in La Stampa that a key route to solving problems lay in investing in the quality of teachers.
She said this could be done by introducing tough selection procedures for teacher training institutes, ensuring effective on-the-job training and also working to raise the status of teachers.
''You have to pay competitive basic salaries otherwise the best will leave teaching for good,'' she said.
Italian schools have been affected by a series of education reforms enacted by successive governments over the last decade. According to some analysts, the frequent protests sparked by reforms have produced a sense of instability.
However Italy's primary school education still receives good marks in international surveys and throughout northern regions many secondary schools score well too.
The OECD report showed that the worst-performing high school students were in Italy's poorer southern regions, where 40% of students were below an adequate level.
Education Minister Fioroni said that in the next seven years four billion euros of EU structural funds would be spent in Calabria, Basilicata, Sicily and Sardinia to ''close the gap definitively''.
