Identità e nazione: Un connubio non necessario (e poco istruttivo)

In this chapter I argue that linking “identity” and “nation” as if they were a natural pair is neither logically necessary nor especially useful for education. I do not deny that children need some form of collective identity and a stable sense of belonging, but I contest the casual slide from “collective identity matters” to “national identity is therefore the right solution”. Treating a general need (belonging) as if it automatically validated one specific subtype (the nation) is a basic reasoning error (a fallacy of composition), and it leads to politically and pedagogically risky conclusions. To make the point concrete, I use Ernesto Galli della Loggia and Loredana Perla’s *Insegnare l’Italia* as an emblematic case of a conservative public debate about compulsory schooling. I describe the book as well intentioned, but marked by an anthropological, technological, and value-level mismatch between the world imagined by the proposed pedagogy and the world in which pupils actually live. The proposal insists that children need “concreteness” and that Italy is the most obvious “concrete” environment they meet daily, but I argue that this presumed everyday obviousness of the nation is not demonstrated and is often simply false for large portions of contemporary life. The technical name for the book’s underlying mistake is “methodological nationalism”. Here I use the term in the sense developed in social theory and migration studies: the tendency to treat the “national level” as a natural container of social life, rather than as a historically contingent and institutionally produced result that must be reproduced generation after generation. I stress that “Italy” is learned through language, historical signposts, geographic conventions, and markers of “high” and “low” culture, and that this learning produces what Michael Herzfeld calls cultural intimacy. But that is precisely the point: the national frame is made, not found, and it cannot be smuggled in as the default setting of experience. I then argue that the old school model as a national homogenizer (a trade-off where local differences are exchanged for national sameness, in a Gellner-style nation-building logic) is far harder to sustain today for at least two reasons. First, a broad moral-cultural expectation has grown that diversity should be respected, and even Galli della Loggia acknowledges that contemporary publics often treat identity, customs, and religion as things people have a quasi-natural right to preserve. Second, and more structurally, identities and cultural economies have deterritorialized: the school no longer controls the gates of imagination, because the informational ecosystem circulates images and values globally and continuously. At the center of the chapter there is a media-ecology argument: from the late twentieth century into the social-media era, the “system of the imaginary” that once glued national communities together has been radically transformed. Recognizing nations as “imagined communities” becomes especially consequential precisely when imagination ceases to be monopolized by the state and becomes a planetary flow of content. I illustrate this with the contrast between my grandmother learning Italian comprehension through state television and my daughter acquiring a Californian-accented English through online immersion. If this is the baseline, debates about “teaching Italy” that presuppose an older monopoly of the imaginary start from the wrong premises. From here I challenge the book’s “experiential” pedagogy, for example the idea that pupils can learn Italian identity by reconstructing family histories or by fieldwork on Roman roads near their territory. I argue that this approach is nostalgically modelled on the Italy of 1970s schooling and underestimates today’s superdiverse classrooms and, more importantly, the shift to an “onlife” condition in which screens and remote interaction reshape the sense of here, now, seeing, and touching. I connect this to what I call the “paradox of intimacy” produced by electronic media (their increasing transparency as media), and I note that the issue cannot be waved away as if the online were merely superficial, given phenomena like severe screen dependency among minors. In the final part I sketch an alternative educational horizon. Rather than trying to re-naturalize the nation through “concrete” objects (maps, food staples, local monuments), I argue that compulsory schooling should openly treat nations as what they are: value systems and imagined communities. What the school increasingly lacks is not material teaching aids, but the capacity to connect heterogeneous elements of pupils’ lives (popular culture, influencers, sports, classics, mathematics, history) into a meaningful frame that feels useful for facing the world. This is where I propose “European civilization” as a modest but workable civic project. The past, in Italy, should be taught as the archive of a civilization rather than the patrimony of a nation, and the educational core should be future-oriented collective belonging grounded in the historical values of liberal democracies (equal dignity of women and men, non-discrimination by skin colour or home language, religious freedom alongside freedom from religion, robust free speech, and the rejection of political violence except in defence, plus a conception of power as responsibility rather than privilege). Within that value-architecture, Italian historical and cultural contents can be taught abundantly, but as expressions of a broader civilizational system, not as proof of a timeless national essence.