Thousands of university lectures, teachers and students all over Italy stopped work on Friday to demonstrate against cuts and reforms proposed by the Berlusconi government’s controversial Education Minister, Mariastella Gelmini.
Under reforms already in place, the number of specialist teachers in primary schools has been cut and class sizes have risen. Some subjects such as Latin have been removed from the curriculum of certain secondary schools and curriculum time for other subjects has been cut. Now Minister Gelmini wants teachers’ CVs to be published online to help parents make decisions about which schools to send their children to. She also wants to link schools with businesses and this is seen by many as a dangerous step along the road to privatisation of the education system.
At the centre of the protests are Italy’s many temporary teachers or “precari”, some of whom have worked for over twenty years with no permanent contract. These teachers do not know which school they will be sent to each year or even if they will have a job at all. Some of them work without remuneration in order to improve their CVs.
Some of Friday’s protests became violent, with students throwing fire bombs in Turin and clashing with police in several other cities. A Milan teacher told ANSA that he had been baton-charged by police during a demonstration.
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