It was a good wind that blew in 1968, carrying extraordinary currents: don Lorenzo Milani's Letter to a Teacher, the ideas of psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, and that year's The Negated Institution: Report from a Psychiatric Hospital, which theorized the closing of asylums. In 1970, Mario Lodi published The Wrong Country, denouncing how in most cases there was "an extraordinary resemblance between the cells of an old prison and the classrooms of schools."
That same year, RAI broadcast Luigi Comencini's documentary Children and Us. In one episode, The Bicycle, the director examined with masterful precision the social and educational problems facing a Roman working-class neighborhood, Prima Porta. Alongside crowded mainstream classes sat "differential" classrooms for students with cognitive and behavioral difficulties. He pointed the finger directly at the ghettoization and shortsightedness of those educational "choices" which, far from solving problems, had devastating effects—irreparably sharpening contradictions.
The ending credits of the documentary itself showed how alive and open the debate was in those years. But the true champion in the push for a flexible school—one capable of welcoming everyone and transcending the discriminatory, exclusionary vision of gentiliana education—had been Mirella Casale since the early sixties. She was a school principal in Turin and mother to Flavia, a child with severe disabilities.
"My commitment to intellectual and relational disability came from a personal experience that caused me the greatest suffering of my life. I contained it by going about my school work normally, without letting my students feel the pain inside me. On October 26, 1957, my daughter Flavia—not yet six months old—contracted Asian flu with very high fevers and developed severe viral encephalitis, followed by a coma, which caused serious damage to her brain."
Mirella Casale, a school principal in Turin and mother to Flavia, a child with severe disabilities, had championed an alternative to the discriminatory, exclusionary vision of gentiliana education since the early sixties.
Mirella Casale, a school principal in Turin and mother to Flavia, a child with severe disabilities, had championed an alternative to the discriminatory, exclusionary vision of gentiliana education since the early sixties.
From 1971 onward, Casale had experimentally placed students with intellectual and psychophysical disabilities—some severe—into mainstream full-time classes at her middle school, the "Camillo Olivetti." From that date, experiments multiplied. Yet even after Law 517 passed, people spoke of "wild inclusion" to express the confusion, sometimes the bewilderment, caused by the complete lack of training not only for mainstream teachers but also for those who were supposed to be support teachers.
I remember that during grading meetings for an eighth-grade exam in Collegno, a colleague wanted to write an H next to the word "Passed" for a girl with a disability. As a department, we refused the proposal—though to most teachers, it hadn't seemed so insensitive.
The problem wasn't really the students with severe disabilities, who were initially few and later became entirely the "support" teacher's responsibility. The problem was those whose social difficulties, behavioral problems, or even neurological conditions went unrecognized—young people who ended up punished, sanctioned, held back. In many cases, differential classes were quietly reconstituted in disguised form, replicating the old pattern of the monster thrown out the front door sneaking back in through the window.
In many schools, especially middle schools, students within a single class were sorted into various groups. Some received instruction in Latin or creative writing or something with real intellectual substance. Others got art. Still others got invited to soccer tournaments—for the restless ones, the ones less inclined to study. Never mind that everyone probably would have preferred playing soccer or drawing; the message was clear.
I still remember a peculiar substitute class at a middle school in Lunghezza. Walking in, I spotted a cluster of top students heading into the small room by the library, equipped with dictionaries and lined paper. "They're mad for the Gallic Wars—there's a test today!" the beaming language teacher explained. The colleague I was replacing was the support teacher for the student with a disability. But during this hour of supposed co-teaching, as she later told me, she was scrambling to keep the other kids quiet while they did or copied homework for other classes—and some of them were "absolute troublemakers." There was no way to actually work with the boy with problems. At least he was well-behaved; sometimes he'd get agitated too, but they'd call his mother and she'd pick him up right away.
Then it was my turn to be that mother, rushing to pick up my son from school. Preschool didn't go well. Everything was so new, and I was constantly afraid of making waves, even when wrongdoing was obvious, but I stayed silent so as not to damage the relationships I feared would harm Massimiliano.
Things improved in elementary school, where the excellent teacher Clive had taken a course in supported writing and used it with him. In middle school the teachers, knowing I was a colleague, counted on my understanding: "There are Roma children in the class, and we have curriculum to cover. Your son gets restless sometimes. It would be better if he stayed home, or at least left early—for his own good." Things hit bottom in high school, where Massi ended up with a support teacher named Gabriella in one of his first years.
Gabriella lived outside Rome. She had a degree in biology and had worked in banking until recently, deciding to enter teaching to work fewer hours. She'd chosen the support position because it was "faster." She was constantly absent because she was enrolled in a Latin teaching course. She'd asked for a transfer to support to get closer to home, but then planned to move to a regular Latin class because she didn't feel suited for support work.
Then it was my turn to be that mother, rushing to pick up my son from school. Preschool didn't work out. Elementary school was better. High school was the bottom. Then I made a decision.
Then it was my turn to be that mother, rushing to pick up my son from school. Preschool didn't work out. Elementary school was better. High school was the bottom. Then I made a decision.
A similar fate had befallen Lorenzo, Massi's classmate and the son of my friend Giuliana, at the same school. But with one addition: Lorenzo's support teacher couldn't leave her dog Filippo alone. Filippo was tied up in the school courtyard and his owner had to go down constantly or he would cry—or rather, howl in a constant singsong. During field trips, the class was chaperoned by the support teacher, Lorenzo, and the dog. Surreal! (Just as surreal was a little comedy between Lorenzo's grandmother and the support teacher: the grandmother's husband was also named Filippo, and the boy got confused hearing his grandfather's name called all the time. The teacher was almost offended—she couldn't change the dog's name after five years. "Well, can you imagine changing my husband's after seventy?" the grandmother shot back.)
It was to escape all this that, after a memorable and liberating call from a park bench in Villa Chigi, crying to Giulia, I decided to take her advice: stop settling for nothing, stop patching up chaotic situations. I had to finally follow my instinct to "bite into problems."
Using a series of favorable regulations, for two years I sat in the desk next to Massi as his support teacher. It was a high school of Human Sciences with mostly female students. The teachers offered no resistance. After their initial surprise, the students—and the few boys—found the arrangement original and quickly liked having that strange pair of a boy and his mother as a support teacher in class.
The teachers were kind, but utterly uninterested in the challenges of including a student with disabilities. It never occurred to any of them to ask my opinion about organizing field trips or end-of-year outings. But the girls and boys, even from other classes, learned to know Massi, to relate to him, and ultimately to not be afraid of him. Massi was calm and happy when classmates came over to do homework. For me, it was a genuinely formative experience.
Years later, in my first middle school class, Lucia arrived—a little girl with motor disabilities as well, very sensitive to noise especially; the slightest thing made her startle, agitate, and cry. But when she was calm and smiling, Lucia was fantastic. No special pleading was needed. It came naturally to everyone—even the louder teachers—to speak quietly, move gently with chairs (heaven forbid making noise), not run around during breaks, and repeat to her whenever possible the nursery rhymes and poems that made her eyes light up.
We all let Lucia teach us, and at least that once, the usual "these children have so much to give" wasn't rhetoric. Still today, in the vocabulary of us colleagues from back then, "Lucia's class" is remembered as "the Gotha"—also a way of saying that things rarely went so well afterward.
There are still many challenges. Truly inclusive projects aimed at benefiting the person with disabilities would require resources and tools that simply don't exist, not to mention genuine political will. But progress has been made, especially in attitudes.
No right, sadly, is ever acquired once and for all, and vigilance can never be lowered, as current events show. Yet when a rule felt to be just—even if imposed from above—becomes conscience, it is hard to step backward.
When I was in school, it was normal for teachers to smoke in class. Then in schools, hospitals, movie theaters, trains, "No Smoking" signs appeared. Now those signs aren't needed. If we look back, we realize with joy that we have moved forward and improved in many ways, despite everything.