Educational needs of the third millennium: The Italian answer

In recent Italian national politics, a law called the La Buona Scuola has been approved in order to attain the “restoration” of school buildings. This norm contains a series of provisions for the upgrading of existing real estate properties and the construction of new buildings, in addition to reforming school institutions. Once it has been approved, there was a design competition announced by the MIUR, the Ministry for University Instruction and Research, planning for 51 #Scuole Innovative. The objective was to obtain structures all over the country having educational spaces that respond to the didactic needs of the third millennium. Well-being, the quality of school life, synergy with the territory: these are the key words for the new concept of school. The conviction, based on European research studies, that there is a close correlation between student achievement and the physical environment of the classroom, leads us to consider it necessary to build schools designed as functional environments, however informal, and at the same time as civic centres with respect to the community of which they are part. Participation in the contest has been particularly large: for the 51 schools involved, MIUR received more than 1200 project proposals. Exceptionally for Italy, the architects have thought about designing a school based on the way it is lived: schools have often been merely buildings made up of hallways and classrooms. But schools by their very nature are also places capable of bringing people together and creating a sense of belonging to the local community. The new approach proposed by La Buona Scuola forces us starting to re-imagine how we conceive the space in schools: on behalf of the people involved, it becomes necessary to choose how we want to inhabit them, based on the teaching orientation and the type of relationship inherent the urban context, both social and residential.