I read it again and again. I cannot believe it. 2020 left us with one last gift: a decree that tastes of another era, of a time we thought had been definitively consigned to the history books. But it hasn't. Legislative Decree 182/2020 allows school councils to exempt disabled students from certain curriculum subjects on grounds of "objective impediments or incompatibility." I read it and read it again, and I cannot understand.
Actually, I understand all too well, and these words burn like salt on an open wound. I know what they mean. I have lived through it. I know the risk we run when the law permits arbitrarily excluding a student from the activities of the rest of the class.
In elementary school in the last century—or rather, the last millennium—I was exempted from physical activity and class games because I might get hurt. For years, the result was spending recess watching the others play and have fun. Later, in high school, when I was already competing in the National Student Games in athletics and cross-country races representing my school, I was assigned a support teacher only during physical education class because my class was doing tennis—the one sport I could not do, having no sense of balance. My "alternative activity" consisted of spending time in the weight room at the tennis club while the support teacher watched me labor under dumbbells.
People with disabilities in Italy abolished segregated classrooms in 1977, before anyone else in the world. But inclusion is hard work. It demands alternative approaches, different ways of teaching, new models of communication outside the standard mold. Exclusion, exemption—that is the easy path, because it sidesteps a problem by removing the student from the group altogether.
But does a school, with the mission to educate, really want to teach the next generation that when facing a problem, you run away—that you eliminate the problem without confronting it? I hope someone at the Ministry thinks again.