Present and Future

One of the popular Italian newspapers “Repubblica” had a study on the Campania Region that Rosaria Vincenzi, Director of the Imparare Giocando, wished to share, it is concerning the sad state of education and social services in southern Italy, and Naples in particular.

“The European Region with the most poor families, unemployed, women with no jobs, and minors living in misery is the Campania Region. The total is about 2 million and of these 24,000 alone are in the city of Naples. One person out of three doesn’t have enough to live on. Two out of ten eat only three times a week. Eight out of ten can not pay the house rent. 40% of the people are unemployed. Two out of ten people who work are earning less than 1,000 euros per month, one out of ten earn less than 500 euros per month. Over half of the population accumulates at least 200 euros of debt per month. The yearly salary is 16,000 euros compared to 33,000 annual salary in the Northern region of Lombardia. One working contract out of two is a time-contract. 45% of children don’t attend school. Among the 80 poorest regions of Europe, the Campania Region occupies the 68 place on the scale. The poor people of southern Italy number a little less than 6 million.

Today work is concentrated in Northern Italy. In the South the unemployment is four times higher than in the North. In the South there is work but it is “the precarious” (15% of the unemployed people) or the so called black work (black market) and it reaches the 30% in Calabria and Sicily.

The Campania region and Naples also show a poor cultural side. We’re far behind in school education as well as in Universities and in the research field which makes even worse our “social capital” and the life of our youngsters. One quarter of the Neapolitan young people leave school after the junior high level. According to experts, these different social and cultural conditions, starting from preschool children, influence children in a very decisive manner, affecting their learning abilities and their ability to express themselves, to distinguish colors, and to understanding space and shapes. In fact, the grades in math of a student with a high social status is over 25% in respect to that obtained by a student with lower social status. The students of Naples today, even if they study in expensive and prestigious schools, still are less well informed in respect to students living in northern Italy. This is not so because they are less intelligent but only because they are very unfortunate to attend very inefficient and depressed school systems.

In Italy there is a big difference between north and south as far as the school system works. All school teachers, some with diplomas or a University degree, agree that the southern Italian school system is much behind their northern counterparts. Every year there is a study done by the Repubblica newspaper, to rank the best Italian universities and the universities of southern Italy are never among the best ones ranked.

Today this means that if you don’t have a good social/economic base as a child, you’re not going to achieve a better social/economic state in the future. In the modern social society, the poor people have only one way to have a good economic development and that is to have a good school preparation. If the poor don’t even have this opportunity they’ll certainly have no better life in the future.

To be children, young people, women, sick, and old people is often very difficult in Southern Italy. It is a certain kind of “generational poverty” which punished the weak segments of society. The welfare system which in the south is essentially a mix of waste, inefficiency, and bad services. Even from birth, the differences seen between Southern and Northern Italy are stark. In Calabria there is a infant mortality rate of 5.4% compared to 2.79% infant mortality in Lombardia. Finally the help that municipalities give to families and their children is an average of 36.40 euro per family in the south compared to an average of 140.5 euros given to a family in the North."