Teachers in the front row for the ius soli – Franco Lorenzoni

There is only one way to celebrate the thirty years of the International Convention on the Rights of Children and Adolescents with dignity: to re-launch a civil mobilization and a political battle with conviction and energy to guarantee citizenship to the million children as soon as possible of immigrants residing in our country.

The convention – ratified by Italy on May 27, 1991 with law 176 – indicates the precise responsibility of the states to "apply all appropriate measures so that the child is effectively protected against all forms of discrimination", respecting their rights "without distinction of arose and regardless of any consideration of race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion of the child or his parents "(article 2). The law therefore exists, but the elementary right to be citizens like their schoolmates in Italy is not guaranteed to the children of immigrants who were born here and even less to those who arrived in our country as children.

For this week, many meetings, seminars, demonstrations and flash mobs are being organized throughout Italy in schools and public places, promoted by various municipal administrations, teachers and associations dealing with children. Save the children has convened demonstrations in 22 cities, from Aosta to Palermo, from Trieste to Potenza for the protection of children's rights, against scholastic dispersion and educational poverty.

The Saltamuri table, which brings together 133 associations, has prepared a vademecum against discrimination in the school and beyond, which the mayors of Palermo, Naples and other cities are spreading in municipal offices and schools.

World classes
Two years ago more than ten thousand professors joined two days of hunger strike, creating a movement of "teachers for citizenship". It was the convulsive weeks of the end of the legislature and the center-left senators did not have the will, courage and conviction sufficient to approve the law on ius soli, already voted to the chamber and remained incredibly still for two years.

Then I was struck by the fact that in that campaign, alongside numerous professors with deep-rooted political convictions, there were many who adhered to more intimate and personal motivations, linked to the character of our profession. If every morning we look into the eyes of girls and boys of the most diverse backgrounds, girls and boys whose families have come here from afar and we believe with conviction that the school is the first public place where we can experience the art of living together, it is clear that for us the dignity of each one is in the first place and in some way, in our classes, we build day by day a sort of small citizenship, which makes all our students equal and supports them in learning.

As Vinicio Ongini accurately documents in his recent Grammar of integration in so many and so many we have experienced in the last decades how much the inhomogeneous classes, although requiring strong commitment and a good dose of flexibility and inventiveness, disclose surprising potentialities. Teaching in these "world classes" is a great opportunity for us teachers and stimulates the most persuaded to engaging research and educational innovations because it is from here that we can cultivate the ambition to give our small contribution to building a less destructive future .

Working and demonstrating that among others one can grow and learn more helps to counter the segregationist drive of too many Italian families, who increasingly distance their children from schools where there are so many girls and boys whose children are immigrants. The only possibility is to transform these schools into the best educational places where research and experimentation, as did Ovide Decroly, Janusz Korczak and Maria Montessori in the last century, founding schools capable of integrating the most fragile, where discoveries were made that illuminated education of all.

The initiatives
The initiatives in the field are the most diverse. On November 20, in the comprehensive school of Scarpa in Milan, the teachers organized for the third, fourth and fifth classes of the primary participation in an animation proposed by the operators of the Young Missionary Service (Sermig) of Turin, which since 1964 has fought against Hunger in the world. The nearly sixty children of the three classes will fish flags from countries on five continents and it will be their fate to separate them: the majority will have to sit on the ground and be content to eat some peanuts or a bowl of rice, while only seven will be able to sit at a laid table. full of food so abundant to advance. A plastic representation of the unequal distribution of food in the world, experienced firsthand. A provocation that will offer arguments and data to discuss around the United Nations Convention.

On November 16, the municipality of Modena, for the fourth year, proposed to all fifth grade students of primary school to attend a ceremony in the square, where the mayor confers symbolic citizenship to all the children who attend last year of primary school.

The Modena initiative, like those of other municipalities, is engaging and, especially in the early years, has moved children and immigrant families, but for Paula Baudet Vivanco, founder of the Italian movement without citizenship, is no longer enough. "We are tired of symbolic citizenships that we do not know what to do with them. The symbolic plan is no longer enough if it is not accompanied by real improvements. Uncertainty continues to be the constant of our lives because, since we were children, we have had to face the constant obstacles that our parents encountered in renewing their residence permits. After the age of eighteen, he expects access to citizenship for too long and there is never any certainty of obtaining it, ”says Baudet Vivanco.

"I, for example, escaped at the age of seven with my family from Chile of Pinochet, only at the age of 33 I managed to become a full Italian, obtaining a citizenship that was refused me at the first request," he adds. "The paradox is that as children we find ourselves suffering from a situation that we have not chosen, and that forces us to look at our future with anxiety, because it is as if the tranquility necessary to grow serenely, the possibility of stay safe with your feet on the ground in our home. We cross borders because we do not always have a guarantee of return, our return keys are temporary and subject to permits and renewals, when for example we go to visit relatives, we participate in sports competitions or school trips. Immigration and citizenship laws have deteriorated continuously and the latest decrees commissioned by Salvini have overturned the difficult and complex processes of reception and stay which, despite the lights and shadows, had activated interesting integration processes in different places, overturning them into a disintegration that causes more isolation and loneliness, throwing us and our families into precariousness and insecurity ”.

It is important to resume the struggle for citizenship to all minors who are children of immigrants or were born in Italy to foreign parents and again, in this mobilization, we teachers can play an important role for our particular position in society, because we know well about what are you talking about. In this regard, some considerations are needed. The ius culturae cannot be considered as a sort of prize, which in some clearly unconstitutional formulations would even be revocable. You do not become a full citizen because you are good at school, but being recognized as a full citizen is rather one of the conditions for getting good at school. Let us not forget, in fact, that the scholastic dispersion of immigrant children today is 35 per cent, twice that of Italians with citizenship.

There is a long way to go, therefore, and it is good that those who teach take charge of it personally because it has a lot to do with the profession of education.