With de Blasio as Mayor, New YorkRestarts with Schools — And Here?

It is the cradle of financial capitalism, a place of social discrimination, and its citizens offer a lesson symptomatic of democracy to all those who, rejecting their own cultural roots and genetic identity, have for decades chased the American dream of a heterogeneous society, where the most (financially) powerful wins.

The new mayor-elect of New York is Bill de Blasio, an Italian-American. Busy for years in the fight against poverty, he has overturned every prediction, registering a consensus-percentage at above 70 percent.

Therefore, in the metropolis of consumerism, it is possible to win by siding with a program that is decisively not popular — taking from the rich to give to the poor. The truth is that 45 percent of the population of New York is below the poverty line. The new mayor-elect declared in his electoral campaign that this is not only “unfair, but also inefficient because it wastes public money.”*

Unfair: It is an adjective used with difficulty in local politics. It sounds old, ancient — communist, naturally — and not sufficiently “modern.” Therefore, it has become part of a vocabulary that the Italian center-left has spasmodically desired to abolish and has succeeded in doing so to delete the traces of its own, nevertheless indelible, original sin. Furthermore, some — the majority — have applied the right to oblivion to their own principles, to such an an extent that, in both merit and method, they have pushed away words of order, like productivity and meritocracy, not only from their own political-cultural mold, but also from worlds they want to attach them to — school, for example.

However, de Blasio intends on restarting exactly at the school level. The main recipe against the rise in inequality and social disintegration is — pay attention! — exactly this socio-educational community, through which to channel economic and intellectual resources. This is the exact opposite of what the enlightened are doing here at home: chasing the myopic idea that what does not produce a profit immediately is not worthy of investment; attempting to stop any instance of a divergent thought on the matter; holding onto the idea that societal goals should outfit schools as places of validation, not emancipation; reducing rights, time and opportunities through draconian cuts, which are discriminatory and, above all, indifferent to learning and citizenship; privatizing and trusting the subsidiarity principle — the burden of every state that has the destiny of its own citizens close to its heart.

De Blasio has understood this and had the courage to state and repeat it, regardless of who stood before him:

“Economic development comes from knowledge; providing a more egalitarian access to knowledge means increasing equal opportunities of economic success and compensating for the inequality that radically different educational paths between the rich and poor often create. I have fought to avoid cuts to public schools and am still fighting with my program for free after-school and pre-kindergarten for all because exclusion starts from infancy.”*

Infancy is a strategic ring even in the Italian educational system. The need for a preschool that is the same for and accessible to all was what set in motion the Bologna referendum, which — regardless of the outcome or, maybe, precisely because of it — found neither any sympathizers, nor the slightest bit of attention from the so-called center-left, with regard to the law on equality, to a great extent responsible for the republic’s failure to fulfill its constitutional task of “establishing schools of all classes and levels,” therefore, including preschools.

To generalize, de Blasio’s aim for undertaking such an ambitious task for this kind of formative training for New York is simple, “Take from the rich to give to the poor.” We will see what he can do. What is certain for the moment is that our center-left will be happy to be inspired by those principles. In this case, the proverbial xenophilia that affects our poignant imitators of Kennedy and Obama will be prudently hushed up.

* Editor’s note: This was mostly quoted material in the original text, but the quotes could not be verified.