Italian youth’s sentiment about world and life and school and rights/duties: youth in a bubble and the education emergency, a field research
Authors: Maffei Roberto , Scrobogna Letizia 
Published: May 2021

Background. Youth is a deeply studied social component but mainly as an object of investigation or, when addressed as a subject to be investigated, mainly from a psychological stance. This social component “will inherit the World” but its point of view on present times reality and its vision about actual problems and perspectives are scarcely investigated. One of the main issues linked to youth is the educational emergency: educational systems in the industrialized societies are in a crisis, given that they use great amounts of resources but their effectiveness is progressively declining and their action results in a growing inadequacy of preparation and in a shrinking of competences for the young.Methodology. We surveyed a sample of Italian Youth, specifically 111 students of 4th and 5th year (the last ones) of Italian High School (age 17-19). We used an opened answer questionnaire, divided into 4 Sections (the World, Life, School/Education, and Rights/Duties) and collected data through support by the involved schools. Questionnaire filling was totally anonymous and no personal data were collected. We chose a qualitative approach and did not predispose any category in which the answers should be distributed; rather, we aimed to examine in deep all the answers and draw “from the inside” the categories to be used. That’s what we did. We pointed out 5 categories, cut across the 4 Sections of the questionnaire, which substantially described in dichotomous variables the degree of openness of the respondents’ stances: social dimension (close/open), spatial horizon (near/far), time horizon considered (present vs. past-future), the own sense of responsibility (passive/active), and realism (concrete/fantastic). Through the distribution of the answers in such categories we built radar-shape graphics representing the respondents’ point of view.Principal Findings. At first we checked the amount of the unanswered questions and the text of the answers in order to assess the suitability of collected data. We found that our sample had answered willingly and sincerely to our questions. About the qualitative analysis, we found that the emerging picture revealed narrow visions, almost exclusively focusing on present time, a tendency to remove responsibility and a preference for unrealistic stances. We created the image of the “bubble”: it looked like if the sample was included in a bubble preventing the widening of minds, visions and actions. This can be interpreted as a substantial unpreparedness to active life and to the global problems young generations will face in their aging. This makes even more crucial the educational emergency: diffusion of culture and cultural contents must be improved, but this is not just a question of learning more contents and acquiring more competences. The question is to mature the role of “citizens of the World”, the only way youth has to effectively tackle the global challenges they are going to directly face in next years.