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The Newspaper in the Classroom
Day after day, "the Newspaper in the Classroom" brings into the Italian junior and senior high school classrooms some of the more authoritative national newspapers in the country so that they may become valuable educational tools capable of imparting a modern form of civic education.
The program was launched in September 2000 and is sponsored with the support of the Prime Minister and the Council of Ministers who are interested in promoting leadership. The Council is also interested in promoting a number of initiatives that aim to promote readership among the young in the public schools.
With the present participation of over 1.7 million students, it means that one student our of every two between the ages of 14 and 18 is now receiving specialized instruction on how to read a newspaper and how to gain greater insight from the news. But our aim is not only to gain a quantitative edge, but to reach also a qualitative advantage by trying to achieve a total revolution to the world of schooling by articulating our message on three distinct points: classroom lessons, training and research.
The newspaper in the classroom represents a civic and social struggle, one that poses four clear basic objectives:
a. First, to guide the students in that delicate moment so typical of adolescence, in which the center of their attention switches from their own personal interests and those of their immediate family and friends to those of the world that surrounds them.
b. Second, to make sure that those same students understand and appreciate that learning well and in depth is the only way to insure that we can gain a better understanding of the world and its cultures, its needs and its ideals as we value our collective human experience.
c. Third, to develop in those same students sense of curiosity as a stimulus on one end to want to enter into the world of truth and knowledge based facts and to thus develop those individual opinions that alone can help us form a critical conscience of the world around us which alone can become the true engine of democracy and freedom of thought.
d. Finally we must impress upon the young the need to enrich their general and specialized vocabularies of the Italian in order to regain a healthy control over our own mother tongue and thus fight the general linguistic impoverishment that appears to be dominating our societies and our communications systems.
