Kids acting as guides in museums for school-to-work alternation: very wrong. Do we find an alternative?

A couple of days ago a press release arrived in the newsroom informing us of an initiative being launched in Florence as part of theschool-to-work alternance projects, the institution introduced in 2003 by the Moratti reform in an optional form, and then made mandatory in 2015 by Matteo Renzi’s “good school” law. The title of the statement read, “young people in museums, ambassadors of art.” To summarize, some groups of students from Florentine high schools and some nearby localities (Pontassieve, Campi Bisenzio), from this Saturday, April 28, and until the beginning of June, for a number of weekends will be sent to the city’s civic museums to “answer the questions and curiosities of visitors.” The communiqué carefully avoids the verb “to guide” and synonyms (or derived nouns), but the summary is summarized in a few lines that leave no room for too many doubts: “the halls of the museums will be enlivened by the presence of young high school students who are perfectly prepared from a historical and artistic point of view and ready to welcome the public by offering an explanation of the environment and the works contained therein.” He followed the calendar of openings, which cover important sites such as Palazzo Vecchio, Santa Maria Novella, Museo Novecento, Museo Stefano Bardini, and Cappella Brancacci. And there is also a three-hour tour through the entire historic center.

Florentine youngsters, however, are not the only ones to take on the role of “museum guides” as part of the school-to-work alternation. In Grosseto, at the Maremma Museum of Archaeology and Art, it is the third-graders from the local classical high school who play the role of guides. And the same happens in Reggio Calabria, where students from the technical commercial institute “Raffaele Piria” lead groups, individuals and schoolchildren to discover the Diocesan Museum. And hundreds of kilometers away, in Treviso, a similar project was recently concluded by fifth graders of the linguistic high school, who between the end of 2017 and April of this year were called upon to offer guided tours to the public of the Bailo Museum and the Museum of Santa Caterina, the two main museums in Treviso.

However, these experiences have not always known smooth unfolding. The students of the Vittorio Emanuele High School in Naples, after the protest conducted at the university museums of the Campania capital during the FAI Spring Days, which became a national case in a very short time, continued to express their opposition with a further demonstration of dissent at the Duca di Martina Museum at the Villa Floridiana in Naples. And also in Naples, students from the Garibaldi classical high school, forced to work for eight hours on May 1 at the Pio Monte della Misericordia, have in recent hours issued two notes in which they explained that, on the very day on which Labor Day is celebrated, they will have to “go and do unpaid work , stealing places from thousands of young graduates,” and embodying “the perfect student-machine role,” which will reduce the greatness of the Pio Monte’s Caravaggio “to a few pages memorized the night before, while hundreds of art history graduates will be serving in some bar.” the result is that “knowledge will shrink and shrink more and more, becoming an obsolete wild card to be flaunted for work purposes, since it is sterile and sometimes bogus.”

Interior of Pio Monte della Misericordia with Caravaggio’s painting, the Seven Works of Mercy. Ph. Credit Windows on Art

It should be emphasized that the activation of many school-to-work alternation paths is based on adistorted and gross interpretation of the law. In fact, Article 2 of the implementing decree of the Moratti reform states that the purpose of alternation is to “implement flexible and equivalent learning modes from a cultural and educational point of view,” “enrich the training acquired in school and training paths with the acquisition of skills that can also be spent in the labor market.” “encourage the orientation of young people to enhance their personal vocations, interests and individual learning styles,” “realize an organic connection of school and training institutions with the world of work and civil society,” and “correlate the educational offer to the cultural, social and economic development of the territory.” In other words, the legislature envisioned school-work alternation not as a form of real work, such as that of a museum guide, but rather as a formative moment aimed at extending what students learned during their schooling and aimed at guaranteeing them an initial contact with the world of work, in order to channel their desires and aspirations with greater knowledge. The wording with the law, however, clashes with what happens in reality. Sending 18-year-old boys to work eight hours a day in a museum to guide the public does not enrich their education, does not foster their orientation, and in no way represents a link between school and the world of work, since the boys end up replacing professional figures. Moreover, it is the boys themselves who admit how the paths they take have upstream a cursory, hasty and bookish preparation, which sometimes does not even provide for on-site study of the works, and in any case is light years away from what a professional in the field could guarantee.

The result is that the knowledge that young people acquire during their courses of study is bent to merely utilitarian ends, used instrumentally for projects that, of the world of work, present students with only its darkest sides. It will never cease to be emphasized that school should be a place where critical thinking can be cultivated: an hour spent getting a high school student to do (poorly and sloppily) a job that is not within his or her competence means taking an hour away from the formation of an informed citizen, and forcing children to work for free eight hours a day on activities that do not satisfy them or are not consistent with what they have studied is tantamount to turning them into many frustrated little clerks before their time. And a school that gives up part of its educational role to submit to logics more akin to those of a business than to those of a place of training is a school reduced to the impossibility of fulfilling its basic functions. Add to this the fact that students have shown that they have a very bad opinion of the school-work alternation. According to a survey conducted by the StudentUnion, a long-standing student union, 57 percent of the students in the study sample said that they had faced a school-work alternation course that was not in line with their course of study, 40 percent noted violations of their rights in the workplace, and 38 percent said they had had to pay something in order to go through their course (cases of students having to pay for the ticket to the museum where they were supposed to carry out an activity, for example, are not uncommon).

What to do, then? While waiting for the school-work alternation to be radically reformed (at the very least, the abolition of its compulsoriness and the introduction of strict stakes that can determine, for example, how far the student’s contribution can be extended, what forms of work he or she can be called upon to do, what hours), change must come from the schools: teachers should become aware of all the problems that have arisen as a result of the introduction of school-to-work alternation and bring this institution back into the mainstream of the student’s education. Students, in other words, should experience school-to-work alternation as an enrichment, as an opportunity to learn how the world works outside school, as a way to deepen what they have learned in the desks. Teachers, therefore, should refrain from pandering to neoliberal ambitions that would like to make school a business, and come up with solutions that can really benefit their pupils. This is not a pipe dream: there are already viable alternatives to paths that lead children to work for eight hours a day in trades for which they are not yet qualified and for which they have not yet acquired sufficient skills. To limit ourselves to the sphere of museums, we could cite the example of the Civic Museums of Venice, which have activated projects where school students can offer their collaboration for various activities: they can, for example, collaborate in the analysis of documents in the collection, be in contact with librarians to learn how book collections are catalogued, preserved and consulted, or they can offer a contribution to the editing of texts dedicated to younger audiences, or they can come into contact with the “behind the scenes” of museums, accessing the deposits and laboratories under the supervision of scientific staff. Then there are realities where young people carry out help desk and first reception activities, alongside the operators. Basically, these are activities that do not require specific prior skills that allow the youngsters to work in contact with professionals, without replacing them and gaining a little familiarity with the museum trades, and more generally with the world of work, with its rhythms, its rules, the rights and duties of workers. The key word must be “learning”-many may have forgotten this, but this is the best rationale for bringing to life a school-work alternation that can be truly satisfying and that can offer young people a useful and perhaps even enjoyable experience.

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