Foreign Pupils, Bad Citizens - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 88

possible. one sentence in the resolution makes its final aim very clear, where it
declares that the government undertakes, inter alia,
not to introduce in the first years any differential treatment between recently-
immigrated foreign children and second-generation foreign children, so as to
allow the latter to perfect their cultural and social integration, this having up
until now been insufficient owing to the lack of adequate measures of support.
however obscure this may sound (what does “in the first years” mean and
what is understood by “treatment”?), the general sense of this obligation is clear:
foreign children ( whatever their practical level of integration and linguistic com-
petence) must be treated on an equal basis and thus the cap on their presence in
class is due simply to the fact of their being foreign. Thus a child of immigrants
born in Rome, who speaks italian as his or her first language with a strong Roman
accent and is happy to speak Roman dialect with classmates, must be treated and
included like a foreign child who arrives in italy at the age of 8 or 9 years, knows
no italian, and has been educated in a different educational, linguistic, and cul-
tural system. or rather, the resolution insists that this equal treatment will serve
to encourage cultural integration of the second generation, which is presupposed
(we do not know on what empirical data) to be “less capable of achievement ow-
ing to the lack of adequate support.” scientific reports do indeed confirm that the
educational achievement of second-generation immigrants falls between that of
native italians and those who have arrived when already of school age (Di bar-
tolomeo 2011). Those reports also indicate that foreign children who have done
all their secondary socialization in the host country have specific needs that dif-
ferentiate them from both native italians and immigrants who arrive in italy
after having had some sort of formal education in their country of origin (Ricucci
2008). it may be difficult to think of second-generation immigrants as the same
as italians in all respects, but it seems just as misguided to think that they are at
the same level as other foreign citizens. one should make further distinctions,
given that vast categories such as “second generations” or “young immigrants”
bring together people who differ enormously in terms of their desires; expecta-
tions; life projects; religious, political, and cultural affiliations (Thomassen 2010;
bello 2011). The types of identity are particularly stratified in second-generation
immigrants, and to reduce them to a general cultural adhesion to the civic prin-
ciples of the state where they have grown up does not allow us to grasp how much
the institutional, participative, and affective dimensions interact in unforesee-
able ways in bringing about integration (Colombo et al. 2011). and yet, Rampelli,
when asked for an adequate interpretation of the governmental obligation advo-
cated by him, confirmed that:
integration is a cultural fact, not only a linguistic one, and therefore cannot be
proven by the fact that a child was born in italy. . . . we need gradually to reach