Who the Hell is Gianni?

Gianni is one of the boys who visited the school of Barbiana and one of the students who wrote the "Letter to a Teacher" back in 1967. Gianni as all the other schoolboys from Barbiana didn't succeed in school, meaning, that his school carreer was very short and a painful experience in opposition to the one of Pierino, a Doctor's son, who seemed to have been born for school and did quite well. The book starts with these words that really stroke me when I first read them as a student teacher in 1982: "Dear Miss, You won't remember me or my name. You have flunked so many of us. On the other hand I have often had thoughts about you, and the other teachers, and about that institution which you call "school" and about the kids that you flunk. You flunk us right out into the fields and factories and there you forget us."

What the PISA survey conducted by the OECD shows (and it seems to have been confirmed by a recent survey conducted by the University of Luxembourg) is in fact nothing we didn't know in Luxembourg, but something we liked and still like to ignore : Students - the Giannis - from low socio-economic status, and recent immigrant backgrounds are less likely to succeed in school than their native counterparts or the students from families with a higher socio-economic status - the Pierinos. This means that the inequality of educational opportunities has and continues to caracterise the Luxembourgish school system. The schoolboys of Barbiana would say that "It remains a school cut to measure for the rich. For people who can get their culture at home and are going to school just in order to collect diplomas."

It is no secret, that children - like Gianni - whose parents don't read much, have had a short educational career, don't speak the languages used in school and therefore can't assist them in doing their homework or in preparing for a test, will have enourmous difficulties to follow the teaching rhythm dictated by textbooks and testing. On the other hand, will the children - like Pierino - whose parents know what is expected from their kids at school have higher chances to get their degrees, regardless of the intellectual potential they may have. As the schoolboys from Barbiana put it : "The doctor's chromosomes are powerful. Pierino could write when he was only five. He has no need for a first grade. He enters the second at age six. And he can speak like a printed book. He, too, is already branded, but with the mark of the chosen race." and "Even the rich have difficult offspring. But they push them ahead."

A few pages later in the book the schoolboys continue quoting their former teacher. She sees the difficulty of teaching Giannis and Pierinos in one class from her own perspective, with these significant words : "Now that everybody comes to school it's impossible to teach. We get quite illiterate students."

This statement resonates with the viewpoint a lot of people persist in and share in Luxembourg and elsewhere. Keeping the doors open as long as possible for students with poor results (in the majority identical with children having a recent immigrant background and/or from families having a low socio-economic status), is suspected to be one of the main reasons for the leveling down of the value of educational degrees.

At the eve of the possible adoption of a new school law by the Luxembourgish government (the old law is from 1912 !) there are a lot of discussion on how to reform education. I'm curious to see if the changes will have a beneficial effect on the Giannis. I have strong doubts because a lot of key factors which determine the so called "hidden curriculum" are not questioned in all the discussions that I have followed so far. Two of these key factors I see are the textbooks that teachers are supposed to work through with an entire class in a given frame of time (on or two years) and the achievements that students are expected to reach in the same period and which they will get certified through test results or by checklists of attained skills and knowledge. If these key factors remain unquestioned, teachers will see themselves evaluated and ranked by these testings and checklists as much as the students and react like the former teacher of the schoolboys did. They will continue to teach under continuous pressure of attaining - in short term - equal outcomes for all students with very different potentials and backgrounds thus having the same old problem - "the Giannis they loose".