Tag Archive for 'conoscenza'

Knowing that you don’t know

The education poverty in Italy

There is no chance for development in a country that has school dropout rates around 20 percent. A kid who gets lost and ends up in the penal circuit costs the state four times more than it would cost if he were placed in a remedial school program.” So said Andrea Morniroli about education in Italy. As coordinator, along with Fabrizio Barca, of the Inequality and Diversity Forum,

Some dire data:

  • Educational poverty affects the country’s GDP at around 4 percent.
  • The Caritas report highlights that intergenerational poverty has very specific characteristics: the social elevator exists for those who come from middle- and upper-class families; other young people remain in their original social and economic condition.
  • Educational attainment is also inherited. The poor stop at the eighth grade and sometimes even only the elementary school leaving certificate; they mostly come from households with low educational qualifications, in some cases with no qualifications or even illiterate.
  • Among the children of people with college degrees, on the other hand, more than half make it to a high school diploma or college degree.
  • In addition to school dropouts, there are also those who do not attain the basic skills to find a job. They are 17 percent in the noon and 22 percent in Sicily. Ninety percent of these are the children of the children of the poor.

This is the picture of a country that has not made knowledge a priority.

The importance of studying for a practitioner

Sport psychology has reached a remarkable level of popularity in academia. Thousands of articles are published each year, spanning all areas of this discipline.

The most important publishing houses very frequently publish manuals rather than books devoted to a single psychological topic or sport discipline.

Finally, there are the popular books and not least in relevance the biographies of athletes in which they often tell how they faced, suffered or solved their mental challenges.

We have at our disposal a wealth of information in which it is also easy to get lost. Over the course of a person’s career beginning in the 1980s, the availability of news has changed dramatically. Human Kinetics had just been born, and there were two international journals. The first English-language handbook I read was in 1984, “Psychological foundations of sport” by John Silva III and Robert Weinberg, and I regarded it as a kind of missal to be consulted weekly on whatever issues came to mind.

Coming to today, I have the impression that psychologists who want to deal with sports read very little and their readings are very much oriented toward popular and not very complex books. They follow athletes a lot, either on instagram or by reading their biographies, and even these are sources of information that do not remain within the scope of an individual’s experience but also become an orientation on which to direct their work. In-depth study of a textbook is not routinely considered a major option. I understand that it may be less compelling than the life narrated by, for example, Agassi in his book “Open,” but it should be unavoidable, and then narrow one’s interest to more specific scientific articles according to one’s interests.

I hope I am wrong and have the wrong perception with respect to this issue of knowledge.

The young have to learning how to learn

This is the thought of Ignazio Visco, Governor of the Bank of Italy concerning the role of the knowledge:

“The challenge we face is not only to provide younger energies to our teachers but especially as to attribute to the many teachers who daily have to cope with limitations and difficulties imposed by tradition, school programs, budgetary constraints, new goals: that is to say, to teach their students “learning how to learn”, to convince them of the importance of ongoing training throughout their lives, working or not, to become permanent researchers, regardless of their occupation contingent “(from Investing in Knowledge, 2014, p. 141).

This is one of the main actions to be put in place to cope with the challenges of the new century.