State matura, a disappointment not only for graduates

2023-06-21 14:36:00, Opinione Jak Simoni

The state matura, instead of being a challenge for young people that in a delicate moment of their lives tests their achievements in the field of knowledge, has become a farce where the challenge is: who can copy more? A farce with painful consequences, especially for the graduates of those schools where the exam was held according to the rules and who believe in studying and not in copying.

Instead of the graduates having a challenge of how much they remember from what they have learned such as: the Socratic virtue, according to which, it is better to suffer evil than to do it; Aristotelian virtue, as the golden mean between two extreme vices; the Senecian virtue of friendship that will be above all interests; the Voltairean virtue of human responsibility for the good he does not do; or the non-Asian principle of action in such a way that the action serves life on earth (it seems utopia, but from the experience in Italy, this is the challenge of an Italian high school graduate), the challenge of high school graduates is who copies first and the output of the thesis is the indicator the main character of this farce.

Everything that graduates have heard, read in Literature, Civic Education, Sociology, Philosophy becomes completely invalid. They learn virtue and will behave without virtue.

The thoroughly rotten society of their fathers puts its sons in the competition of the ability to copy or cheat. This has been happening for years and no solution is being found. A few years ago, a colleague, who had corrected some theses, had noticed that in a math exercise all the classes had put the equal sign on the denominator of the fraction instead of putting it on the dividing line. Of course, the best of the bunch had randomly placed it, then the whole class "precisely" copied it.

All students who copy in this way can get more points than the best in the class who did the exercise first. Not only do they finish the matura in this way, but they choose more preferred branches for high school, because the distribution of students in high school is 50% based on the state matura.

It is time to find a way for graduates to be freed from this unnecessary stress. The state matura has turned into a "challenge" "life or death", which determines the distribution in high school; "challenge" in which parents, friends, corrupt money, rulers are involved to create the conditions for someone's son or daughter to copy. Thus a discrimination is produced where the victims are those who learn and children without support.

One might well think of something different. Taking Italy as an example, there would be no harm if the way of conducting the matura exam is alternated with discussions with representatives of the ministry and external teachers, while for higher education, let the universities do the entrance test there where the demands are higher than the quotas, as they are starting to do in medicine. The unfair way of evaluation and therefore distribution in higher schools, makes this country even more disgusting to young people and not only.