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There are the red areas of infection, which we all hope to quickly forget. And then there are the red zones of educational poverty, which are instead destined to weigh for life on those who live there. One in nine minors in our country lived in conditions of absolute poverty even before the pandemic. Then, Covid-19 caused hundreds of thousands of students to disappear from the radar of schools. Now, stubborn lessons and reduced training opportunities risk creating an army of the underprivileged. Mostly women: 1 million 140 thousand girls without studies, work and training.
Above all, they will pay the bill, because the pandemic is an inequality multiplier that hits the hardest where the wound is already open. This is what Save the Children says, which, on the eve of World Day on Friday, publishes its eleventh “Atlas of Children at Risk”. “With the eyes of girls” is the title of the report. Eyes that will need to see for themselves the path to redemption, because the school system is not doing its part.
There is an expression that is enough to sanction the failure of the school as an antidote to the gender gap: “The illusion of equality”, as defined by Raffaella Milano, director of Save The Children’s Italy-Europe programs. “Yes, in school the mirage of equality is created in girls,” she explains, “because in that context there is a condition of equality with classmates. But expectations are shattered in the first confrontation with the world of work. And some signs are already registered in the first years of school, for example with the gradual withdrawal of girls from science subjects. Specific interventions are needed to promote girls and girls to acquire confidence in their abilities in all sectors. ‘
The risk of giving up on your dreams is very high. It is a limbo in which one in four girls is already trapped today, with peaks approaching 40% in Sicily and Calabria, and which also sees a gap in the most virtuous territories, such as Trentino Alto Adige, compared to 7 , 7% of boys, girls inactive are almost double (14.6%). Gender gaps that also affect work, with an unemployment rate between 15-34 years of age reaching 33% compared to 27.2% for young men. And the Neet girls (they do not study and do not have or are looking for work) are 24.3%, compared to 20.2% of the boys.
Education continues to be a “protective” factor for future goals, but young women going to university are also paying dearly for the crisis: among recent graduates of the first semester of 2019, only 62.4% found work, with a decrease of 10 percentage points compared to 2019, while for men, although penalized, the decrease is 8 points (from 77.2% to 69.1%), with salaries higher than 19%. And all this despite the fact that girls graduate more than boys and generally perform better in school.
The educational peripheries, of course, are not only female. Daniela Fatarella, general director of Save The Children, uses the dramatic image “of a whole generation to be protected”, due to the educational inequalities that erupted in the months of the pandemic. Words that make us reflect on the sacrifices that the emergency has suggested to impose on the school. Between the limits of distance lessons and digital education and the disconnection between school and families, scenes from other times reappear: “From the territories we receive reports of children and young people who disappear from the radar of schools: we must intervene immediately in the red zones of poverty and youth dispersion to face a double crisis, health and education ”, says Raffaella Milano.
It is a hole, the formative one, that can be created in a few months, but which is then destined to remain for a lifetime. In an era in which even in Western democracies, and especially in Italy, the social elevator has stalled. “The mechanism that allowed improving one’s condition has been broken – emphasizes Fatarella – Italy had already put childhood in line with its priorities and now, faced with a health and socioeconomic challenge like the one we are facing, it is fighting to change course, placing children and adolescents at the center of relaunch policies.
The weakness of the alimony unfolds in a thousand defects. Access to nurseries, for example, remains a privilege: only 13.2% of children have access to a municipal facility, with percentages stopping at 3% for Calabria, 4.3% for Campania and 6.4% for Sicily. A very evident territorial gap that places the province of Trento at 28.4% and Emilia Romagna at 27.9% on the opposite side of the ranking. But even further on the growth path, the educational poverty indicators confirm a serious situation even before the emergency: almost one in four high school students (24%) do not have the minimum skills in mathematics and Italian, 13, 5 % drop out of school early and more than one in five (22.2%) join Neet’s army.
But there is a fact that, by itself, measures the failure of policies for the younger generations: in the last ten years Italy has lost more than 385,000 minors, who today represent 16% of the total population. The incidence of children aged 0-14 is the lowest among EU countries (13.2% compared to 20.5% for the leader in Ireland). It is not a country for young people, nor for children. And we are losing them.
