The Italian school system is responsible for adapting its educational activities to the new social needs rising from the evolution of social dynamics. The challenge posed by our "cognitive society" forces School to guarantee guidance based on new ethics, founded on its capability of stimulating critical intelligence, linking knowledge with "knowing how to", the acquisition of new study and work methods, translating knowledge into significant operations in favour of the change. Our ambitious aim is to raise the levels of competence of all students, guaranteeing each of them an equal opportunity in exercising their rights as citizens. The importance attached today to all educational and training themes in the policies of most States shows the need to implement a school system that is able to face the challenge of Democracy and the technological revolution.
Starting from September 1st, 2000, schooling in Italy will take on a new form, radically modifying its rules and functions. Adoption of the concept of autonomy, the first big reform in education, intends to be an answer to the educational demand of a complex society riddled by rapid processes of transformation requiring increasingly updated acquisition of the subjects , a wide communication circuit, and concrete opportunities for young people to realise their potential.
Within the scholastic ambit of Quality, referring to schools' autonomy in organisation and curricula, the Directorate for Lower Secondary Education, in co-operation with the other central Ministry offices, has co-ordinated and supervised the "Copernicus Project" - name evoking the concept of the solar system, attributing a different point of reference. So autonomy determines a "new system of ideas and rules" useful for interpreting and regulating the movement, the role and functions of a group of persons held together by relations and interconnections. The primary goal of research and actions for Progetto Copernico has been to identify the essential elements of this new order and this has favoured the knowledge and subsequent intervention on some of the aspects of school autonomy.
New professional profiles are emerging in the school system involving all traditional roles: teachers, non-teaching staff, headteachers. They are required to introduce organisational and cultural innovations, to weave networks of relations, to configure the single institute as a subject with teaching and educational initiatives,to build the school identity within the context in which it operates and to carry out it in the Teaching and Educational Plan (Piano dell’Offerta formativa). Management of educational and organisational processes by a system involving students, parents and non-teaching staff, becomes an added value developing individual competences, consolidating relations of active interdependence in the school environment and increasing the quality of the service.
These new roles that will be played in the schools must be dynamically interpreted as they are in evolution and, in the meantime, promote evolution in the context in which they operate. A new mentality will be affirmed, founded on the acceptance of responsibilities, and an opening to comparison, for self-evaluation of behaviour through suitable tests and collective control of processes and results.
Progetto Copernico provides a cultural heritage supporting autonomy, it is an articulated reference model now available to all school staff who wish to consult multimedia for updates and comparisons. Network results are varied and also refer to the overall experience of the schools involved. Products obtained and processes followed in carrying out the Project have the merit of presenting the different aspects of autonomy without pretending to exhaust the description of all the possibilities they contain. There are already some important meanings that are agreed when speaking of autonomy. Firstly, autonomy is a continuous quest to conjugate creative processes in a territorial ambit and the institutional aims recognised at national level. With regard to the internal management of the schools, the study of the educational processes has clearly shown that the organisation of independent schools is closely linked to teaching activities, with mutual functions.
The effects of co-operation between school and research are totally new and have to be assessed over time. On short terms, we can speak of the diffusion of a communications culture, an exchange of knowledge and the integration of skills that are increasingly decisive when planning educational paths of greater quality.
The fundamental aim of school autonomy, collocated in a frame of wider independence, is the quality of the paths and the valorisation of all the protagonists involved in the guidance process who are able to contribute to optimising the government of change.
We thank all the persons who have made Progetto Copernico possible, for their high cultural and professional level. Many thanks and appreciation for the jobs they have done, experienced as a personal and collective commitment to the benefit of the whole educational system.
Alfonso Rubinacci
General Director for Lower Secondary Education
