Italy revives policy of failing badly behaved pupils to ‘bring back respect’ | The “grades for conduct” policy, similar to a measure first introduced by Benito Mussolini, gives schools the power to fail students based purely on their behaviour.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/26/italy-pupils-grades-for-conduct-law
28 Comments
Then big mean kids will be with smaller kids… sounds like a recipe for disaster
I support this to an extent
Consequences – the term you’re looking for is consequences
Behavior is a very subjective measure, even when we think we’re measuring it objectively.
Will they also provide extensive counseling and other mental health support? I like the idea of children, and grown ups for that matter, being held responsible for thier actions. But unless you also provide some kind of mental health care it’s not going to help just to flunk them.
>Middle school and high school pupils who score five or less out of 10 on conduct will fail the year and face having to repeat it even if their academic standard is up to par.
so no discussion or mention of the data on how that works out? effectiveness of having students repeat a year for a) academic reasons b) any given reasons? surely you’d want to know that to be able to even vaguely guess at whether repeating students for behaviour reasons is going to improve something/anything/what exactly?
I can see this becoming a tool for teachers to punish the kids they don’t like for any reason
The only D I ever got in high school was from a civics teacher that I would debate creationism with after class and who gave me pro creationism pamphlets to prove her case. They were laughable bad in a scientific sense which even a 14 year old me could tell were illogical nonsense.
This was in the early 70s and in hindsight I should have made a huge stink about it. Perhaps if I’d been a straight A student I would have. Then again they probably wouldn’t have given such an uncharacteristic grade if I were.
Point is, this kind of latitude will enable teachers the levers to enforce their world view on others, or at least drag down those that don’t.
This has proven gen to be very effective in the past. It’s a primary reason Italy has long been known for never producing any criminals.
You’re smart enough to get good grades but you’re an a-hole? Force them to take the GED until they pass it. I don’t care if there 12.
Hopefully with advances in AI and robotics, the really bad kids can be put in special schools where they can’t hurt anyone. The teachers will be robots that can restrain them or break up fights.
Hard disagree. If someone gets into fights repeatedly or brings a knife to school and threatens kids, you can’t fail students? He can just switch schools and go unpunished? Cause the police in Italy sure ain’t gonna do shit.
There’s also no such thing as too old for school. 50 year old people attend school at nighttime after work to this day.
Also imagine hiring kids that aren’t straight A behaviour in law enforcement. Less than A? Go to military, kid, and get straightened out. Back in my day the only way to lose behaviour points is to be insolent and violent. Even skipping a lot of grades could be worked out with school donations and diplomacy, only repeated violence or violence with a weapon wouldn’t,
God this headline is bad. “Grades for conduct” are a thing that already existed, the new policy is just stating that if a student gets a 5/10 or less (which is considered a failing grade in any subject) then they have to hold them back.
Which is worthless anyway because if the school decides they don’t want to hold someone back they can just give them a 6 anyway, which they already do with all other subjects if they feel like.
And getting a failing grade in conduct is stupidly hard anyway, in most schools you basically need to be doing something outright criminal for that to happen.
Can we start failing companies for the conduct of their C-Suite and sell it to whoever we want?
Have you met some of these “ prize “ pupils ?
Terrible
If it was a Mussolini idea how can it possibly go wrong?
This surely won’t be misused against minorities and poor kids. No sir.
It would be a waste of resources to put an otherwise passing student in a remedial class or keep them in school longer. Also this will likely be abused.
In addition, kids who act out and get in trouble and then are arbitrarily denied what they’d need to gain skills are going to spiral even more out of control as young adults without intervention, leading to an increase in crime and other social problems.
But hey it’s Italy, which a backwards dying country whose education system and workers are bottom of the barrel by western standards anyways so who cares. The kids who flunk can just find opportunities in the mafia.
So, like, a badly behaving pupil; like a young boy of 6 acting out in class gets a bad behavior grade, even if it’s because the kid has unidentified autistic traits that, if managed, would make him a good student?
Or is a girl that frequently needs to leave class getting the bad behavior grade, even though she has the periods from hell and her parents won’t let her take birth control to control her periods?
Perhaps it’s the young woman whom everyone assumed was a young man until the young woman told them otherwise? Is her bad behavior grade going to fail because she is pursuing being her authentic self and a teacher rather preferred they’d continued pretending to be a boy?
Could it be the teen who is speaking out against the teacher’s preferred political figure? The teen doesn’t know this teacher leans any which political way, but the teacher knows that only someone behaving badly wouldn’t support ***their*** party; so does the student loose the grade because their teacher assumes poorly of their character, not because of any particular action?
I know this is Italy, and it has its own flavors of fascism going on and is not the US, but this is free speech 101! If you give people in authority positions the ability to rank people by subjective traits like “bad behavior,” then you are guaranteeing that this new power will be abused to censor those the authority does not like. Yes, schools have expectations of behaviors because part of school’s role is to shape kids into people who can function in this world. However if you make it a grade, you are enabling someone with power over a child to decide that they don’t want to deal with a child’s learning needs, and so fails them on bad behavior. Or the teacher who thinks women can hold their periods in, so they need to wait like everyone else can fail this girl because she just needs to learn to hold it in. You get where I am going with this.
I am from Italy and old enough to see the conduct grade when I was in school. I can assure you that this is much noise for nothing. To get failed for conduct, you need borderline criminal behavior in multiple occasions.
Then grades become meaningless. They’re supposed to be a reflection of intelligence and the ability to express it within a school setting, not a measure of conformity.
I feel like bringing back failing students based on grades would be enough. Getting pushed through lower grades is way too much of an issue
Kids flunking or getting kicked out of school will create a bigger pool of low-wage workers. Is that the intent?
It used to be called citizenship. It’s still part of the grade in some American schools.
Nah. This is a terrible policy flat out.
It’s far too reliant on the premise of “surely there will be exceptions”. And we all know how that goes.
What is the issue here? Should we not make the trains run on time because that’s something Mussolini was known for and therefore timely trains are bad?
What?? You think climate change exists, you dont blame migrants for every bad thing in the country and a first-world state should have a good social system? You can stay in 7th class for the rest of your life Antonio