Italian School Schedules and Calendars

Rossella is in her first year at Liceo Artistico (art high school), and we're all struggling to adjust to her new pace of education. We didn't know that Artistico requires more hours in the classroom than probably any other school: 4 days @ 5 hours plus 2 days @ 7 hours equals 34 hours a week, with only brief recess breaks, even on the two days that they have a lunch period. This time is divided into 40 periods of 50 minutes each.

19 periods are spent on standard academic subjects: biology, literature, religion, algebra, physics, grammar, English, history, anthology, and narrative (not sure I see the difference between these two and literature, but it seems to add up to several different kinds of reading each week). Then there are 19 periods of art: technical drawing, "plastic arts" (sculpture), art history, and pictorial arts. Finally, two periods of physical education. All that, and they still have homework most days.

School six days a week, ugh. Not only does Ross have to get up on Saturdays: so do I, to ensure that she does, though this is probably easier for me than for her. I'm the only morning person in this family, though occasionally even I like to have the option to sleep in. And most Sundays we'll be getting up early as well, so Ross can ride. Groan.

School on Saturdays is traditional in Italy, but many schools in Milan have moved away from it, I suspect because many Milanese like to escape the city on weekends, fleeing to their second homes at the beach, on one of the lakes, or in the mountains (hence traffic is hideous going out of the city Friday night and back in Sunday night). Lecco retains the Saturday tradition, so it's a good thing we are not in the habit of going away on weekends. On the other hand, who needs to? Lake Como is one of the places the Milanese escape to!

School's Out

Jun 29, 2007

...in fact it's been out for several weeks now, since June 10th in Lombardia. And it doesn't re-convene til around September 10th.

As an editorial by Isabella Bossi-Fedrigotti in yesterday's Corriere della Sera points out, this very long summer break harks back to a time when most Italian families had a mother at home full-time, and grandparents and other extended family members living nearby who could pitch in to help with childcare, and all workers had a month of vacation in summer during which the whole family typically went away somewhere.

None of this holds true for many Italians today, especially in the northern cities: in many families both parents need to work to make ends meet. Grandparents may be far away because parents migrated to find jobs, or, given the late ages at which many people of my generation have children, the grandparents may be so old and frail that they need care rather than being able to provide it. Even the famed Italian vacation is getting shorter and shorter as employers increasingly feel the heat of global competition and try to squeeze more productivity out of their employees.

We faced this summer problem ourselves when we were living in Milan during Ross' childhood. The city of Milan helps out by offering colonie estive (summer camps) at properties it owns at the seaside, in the mountains, or on the lakes. These provide two weeks of full-time childcare at a sliding scale fee, hence accessible to even the poorest of citizens. But you could only send your child for two weeks per summer. So Milanese parents scramble every summer to find sports programs, English schools, etc. to keep the kids busy.

Aside from family management problems, it's undeniable that kids simply forget too much of their learning in three months. Teachers attempt to remedy this by giving loads of summer homework, which usually means that it falls upon the exhausted parents to nag and assist their children to do the work during their own much-needed vacation.

The "obvious" remedy would be to shorten school vacations but, as Bossi-Fedrigotti rightly states, this would meet ferocious opposition from teachers, who are poorly paid and will defend tooth and nail the major perk of their job: that long summer off. The alternative would be to pay them more, but with the way the Italian economy is going, it would be difficult to find the money to do so.

You might think that there's a market opportunity here for private schools, who could charge more to run a longer school year and can pay their teachers more. But apparently they are by law held to the same calendar as public schools...