By the time of my field work, mainstream media were saturated by a general agreement that the education system needs to be adapted to the labour market, along with numerous disagreements on how this could actually be done. But let us first take a look at the official statistics: official data shows that the unemployment rate in the south of Italy drops dramat-ically with age and less dramatdramat-ically with level of education. For exam-ple, in 2014, the unemployment rate in the province of Lecce dropped from 62 per cent for people aged between 15 and 24 to 34 per cent for 25– 34 year olds and 19 per cent for those over 35 years old. In the same year the total unemployment rate in the region of Puglia dropped from
26 per cent for those with lower or no education to 21 per cent for those with secondary education and 13 per cent for those with graduate or post- graduate studies.18 So this data show that graduates above 35 years old have the highest chances of finding employment. However, only 12 per cent of young people from Grano go to university.19
We have seen that Grano society predisposes individuals from an early age to engage with distinct cultural paths, such as those of the high schools and those of the technical and vocational schools. Each of these trajectories corresponds to a very clear social position, making it extremely difficult for most people to change their course once they have started on the chosen educational path. Generally professional retrain-ing can take several years and does not necessarily lead to permanent employment. This is reflected, for example, in the profound anxiety of the middle classes to put their children in the ‘right’ school or to engage in as many extra- curricular activities as possible.
In the affluent 1980s and 1990s, when employment in industry and consumption reached their absolute peaks, most people in south-ern Salento used to believe that formal education might lead to employ-ment. In particular, the vocational schools acted to prepare the working classes who were required by the growing market. But now, with this economic boom ended, only the higher classes have retained the ideal of gaining a formal education as embodied by the theoretical high schools.
Difficulties in finding employment after finishing school are shifted fur-ther off in time by sending their children to university, and they are com-pensated by the assurance that their children did attain the best possible schooling. In contrast vocational schools, which basically collect stu-dents who do not fit into the more prestigious schools, no longer seem to represent any ideal at all. We suggest that this lack of ideal is reflected in the insistence of students in vocational school on using social media during school hours.
All three head teachers in Grano and many other teachers con-firm that the aspirations of parents for their children’s future are always higher than the aspirations of the students themselves. In this society status is represented by the lawyer, the doctor, the intellectual and occa-sionally by the successful entrepreneur, and few families can afford to turn their children into any of these: they would need to support long and costly studies, and often would need to have useful personal con-nections as well as economic capital. In consequence there is a perma-nent sense that, despite the effort people make, they are hardly ever able to reach their aspirations. Not even parents who manage to send their children into graduate studies are very sure of what the outcome will be
for their children. However, most of these parents simply feel obliged by their own status to follow this route.
In this context, many people in Grano see formal education as both a compulsory duty and a mirage.20 They see that the education system should be made more flexible and adapted to the work market, but it feels little more than a catchphrase, an illusion offered by Italian poli-ticians in recent years. At least five major reforms in the Italian labour system have been undertaken since 1995, two of them in just the four years before I wrote this book and these, according to left- wing observ-ers, led to work being gradually seen as a product to be bought in a free market.21 These reforms have included major changes in the pen-sion system (from earnings-related to contributory penpen-sion), support for temporary work contracts and atypical work, a downsizing of the costs for redundancy and a restriction of employees’ rights. They were intended to increase competiveness in the private sector and to re- ignite the national economy.22
Fig. 6.4 Meme shared on Facebook deriding the recent pension reform law known as ‘Law Fornero,’ after the name of the ex- Labor minister who raised the retirement age and hardened the requirements for retirement. The meme reads: ‘Thank you Fornero!’
My research suggests that one reason why formal education is so separate from the labour market is that it overlooks the important local traditions of craftsmanship and apprenticeship. In Salento the tradi-tional way to acquire working skills for adult life was through practice within the family and through apprenticeship. Traditionally people from all social classes would send their children, as young as 10 to 12 years old, to artisans or to help in commerce and agriculture in order for them to learn a profession and to learn the discipline of working. But this practice collapsed in the second part of the last century with the rise of massive industrialisation, mass consumption and fundamental changes in state education. Labour was increasingly pushed outside the family confines by the state and was instead tied to formal education, while the minimum age for compulsory education was raised. This series of reforms crushed in just a few decades not only the strong tradition of artisanship, but also any interest parents had in encouraging their child-ren to learn practical skills outside the formal system.
The tradition of Italian artisan production challenges many of the requirements of a modern state, and public education is not designed to replace the disappearing artisanship. In this chapter we have discussed four social categories – entrepreneurs, people with liberal activities, women who work exclusively in their households and the higher edu-cated unemployed – which each embody different artisanal practices.
The people in these categories sense that their work is an essential part of themselves, and therefore should be invested with public visibility. So they use Facebook to show their individual attachment to a social and creative juxtaposition between education and work.