At the end of the year it’s time to take stock and as usual this year too we have relied on Enzo Jannacci’s metrics. To remember, but also to laugh about it
Another year of school has passed. Ministers, directions, programs, dreams and fears change, but the school never seems to change. Or at least not for the better. The numbers and data that tell the story make it a portrait that is always the same and, if possible, decreasing. It was like this last year, the same goes for the balance sheet at the end of the quarter of the twenty-first century. The discussions, always the same. Solutions, always distant. The proclamations, always oversized compared to the action, always at zero cost. Let us be lulled by the metric of Jannacci’s “Quelli che…” to travel backwards and relive the best (worst?) of this 2025 between desks and chairs.
Those who…wear their Christmas sweater for the last day of school;
Those who…teaching is a fundamental profession, but the prestige drops and the salary remains unchanged (Fourth National Survey on Italian teachers, by Unimib and others);
Those who…next year will adopt the Finnish organizational model, And Merry Christmas!
Those who… choose high school by looking at a ranking in the newspaper, and come on;
Those who… my son will go to the school he wants, but then they enroll him in the one they did;
Those who… didn’t have Christmas lunch with their relatives because they had one last open day online, oh yeah;
Those who…hands up and give me that cell phone;
Those who… would have preferred to educate on the use of cell phones rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, alright;
Those who… criticize ministerial indications;
Those who… we parental education, uuussignur;
Those who…go to the bathroom, pee, then update the rape list posted on the wall (27 November 2025, Giulio Cesare high school, Rome);
Those who…are placed in the chair on December 16th, oh yeah;
Those who…are sick;
Those who…return, like my friend Luisa;
Those who… the debate, artificial intelligence, and the students end up no longer writing;
Those who…students can’t write anymore – well, maybe because they don’t write anymore?! mmm;
Those who… are preparing for graduation but would like to know what it will be like, so huh;
Those who… criticize the minister on duty but then take selfies if they meet him, oh yeah;
Those who…those who abstain;
Those who… go to class but the classrooms fall apart;
Those who…enough with these three months of school holidays, and stop asking for air conditioning in exchange! But what?;
Those who… go to school willingly;
Those who… need a level playing field at school, huh?;
Those who…count records of 100;
Those who… at the physics exam to enter medicine look at the paper and don’t know where to start;
Those who… it’s the fault of those who teach physics ooooh yeah;
Those who… the Bible is the great absentee from Italian schools (Umberto Eco said it, not exactly a bigot);
Those who…well, music would also be missing in high school, Your Honor;
Those who… talk about songwriters and try to keep them alive amidst so much fluff;
Those who… at school raise funds for the children of Gaza, oh yeah;
Those who argue over questions of principle, because they have a bias, because they’ve been pissed off for twenty years (or maybe thirty-five…);
Those who…write circulars with AI;
Those who… don’t read the circulars and have them summarized by the AI, massive;
Those who…study on – right above – chatGPT;
Those who…invoke general states to re-establish a completely new school for this century which has now closed its first quarter and everything is as it was twenty-five years ago (or even thirty-five…);
Those who…wait, wait in vain, ooooh yeah;
Those who… will return to the classroom and to the desks on January 7, 2026 holding on, or despite everything – as you prefer – trying to give meaning to everyday life, to still get something out of this old bandwagon that is our school, which we have to love and for which it is still worth doing something, or not? I think so.
