Valditara: cap on foreigners in class by law decree

The new name on the cap on foreigners in class "will be a law decree because we need to intervene immediately". Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara said this, explaining that "from this year it will concern new arrivals, but let's be clear, we are not breaking up the classes".

Valditara underlined that "the criterion is purely linguistic. Anyone who says otherwise is lying, knowing they are lying" and highlighted the "centrality of language as an instrument of integration. We want to avoid the Alabama conditions of the 1950s with ghetto classes". The ceiling, he argued, also applies to students from the European Union who do not speak Italian: "If a Polish boy does not know Italian he cannot integrate. So, the problem is not ethnic origin, national origin, racial origin. The problem is the knowledge of our language".

Valditara clarified that "there is no clash at the Quirinale" after the words of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on the circulars signed by Mattarella when he was minister. "Our initiative, as the President of the Republic said very well in Amatrice, goes in the direction of integration. We want foreign children who do not speak our language adequately to avoid being ghettoised", said the minister.

"The local school offices will coordinate the principals to distribute students in a more balanced way among the nearby schools; where this is not physically possible, exemptions and an enhancement of the teaching of Italian will be provided", he explained in the press conference presenting the decree law. “The new measure will be a binding law providing an adequate mechanism to make it operational,” he added.

"The ghetto school", he reiterated, "is when a student is marginalized compared to the rest of the community and therefore we do not want the Alabama schools of the 1950s, where on one side there were whites and on the other side there were blacks".

"A lot of exploitation has been made about this matter - he continued - inappropriate words have been used that in a civilized country I would not have liked to hear such as racism and suprematism. The words of Mattarella and Zuppi have been exploited. We too want integration and I have heard people say 'no to the ghetto classes'. Mattarella said something that we too are saying with this provision". "We are not chasing Vannacci, if anything he is chasing us", he concluded.