A Soft Prison Called Compulsory School Time

This article attempts to reflect on school time as a paradoxical moment of realization of a right (that of education and upbringing) and de facto negation of other intangible and yet essential rights (the right to play, to the construction of an authentic identity, to self-fulfilment, to freedom). Starting from a provocative, hyperbolic question that could be dismissed as utopian and academically irrelevant: «Can compulsory school time be considered a potential soft crime?», this paper tries to delve into technical and functional aspects of school organization to analyze the potential and shortcomings of en-situation school time, trying to account for the complex dynamic interferences that link functional homologation, social mobility and ordering control. In particular, while citing virtuous and vicious examples of school time taken from realities distant in geographical space or the result of a historical moment other than the current one, this paper focuses on Italy as a case study, with particular reference to the school segment of Kindergarten and some hints relating to primary and lower secondary school - the latter being configured as a weak segment par excellence. Finally, the examination of some legislative measures (in particular Law 53/2003 and Legislative Decree No. 262 of 29 December 2007) will highlight a key problem of school time, namely the split between two moments (infant, primary and middle school on the one hand, upper secondary schools on the other) which is also a split between two modalities, which translates into an opposition between school understood as a social service in the first phase and academia or early professionalization in the second one. A split perpetrated in violation of the healthy principles of didactic continuity and which finds questionable counterweights in the exceptionality of the competition-excellence binomial and in the normality of the flattening-demotivation of the learners binomial.