The text below is taken from the website Marxist.com:

Universities have been occupied in Bologna, Cagliari, Florence, Milan, Rome, Naples, Pisa, Lecce, Padua, Turin, etc. In Milan, Palermo, Sassari and Cagliari normal lessons have been suspended and replaced by activities aimed at strengthening the mobilisation and discussing the details of the education counter-reform presently going through parliament. Mass assemblies with students, teachers, researchers and other workers are taking place in all faculties of most universities. “Outdoors lessons” have been organised in Bari, Bologna, Trento and Naples. Mass demonstrations have been staged in Parma, Genoa, Bologna, Naples, Rome, Milan, Pisa, Cosenza, Catanzaro, Siena, Turin, L’Aquila, Venice, Sassari etc. and more cities like Pavia, Bergamo and Trieste are to follow. A large demonstration moving from La Sapienza University in Rome has surrounded the Senate.

High-school students are also on the barricades. To list all the schools that have been occupied would be impossible, and student demonstrations are taking place on a daily basis all over the country. Primary and middle schools are also in turmoil, with the trade unions co-operating with committees of teachers and parents in the organisation of the protests against the government. There have even been reports of occupations of primary schools!

What has provoked this movement is an attempt by the right-wing government to cut state funding to education on an unprecedented scale. Berlusconi and his ministers Giulio Tremonti and Mariastella Gelmini thought the moment was ripe for one large swoop, concentrating all the plans they had in one big shot. They believed that after the post-election shock the trade unions and the Left would be too confused to fight back. This was clearly a serious miscalculation.

Schools have been hit particularly hard, with cuts that would amount to 8 billion euros over 3 years. Spending on the university system would be cut by 1.5 billion euros over 5 years. State universities are to be privatised by transforming them into private foundations (a process which had already been set in motion in previous years with the active co-operation of centre-left governments). Several measures are being proposed that would reduce the number of workers employed in the state education system, in a country where on the one hand schools and universities are in terrible need of more teachers and on the other hand thousands of graduates every year are forced to remain unemployed, emigrate or accept humiliating McJobs. The hopes and aspirations of researchers and other young temporary university and school staff, who are trying to become teachers, are being frustrated once more, and this has created a particularly militant mood among these sections who are now organising strikes and other forms of struggles.

Gelmini, the new Minister of Education, has made proposals that include raising the size of classes to thirty pupils and to reduce the number of lessons and teachers, thus lowering the quality of state education. Schools in small cities and towns (due the geographical features of the country, there are many small schools in towns like these) are to be closed and other schools will be brutally merged and “rationalised”, causing serious problems for working class families and at the same time creating further unemployment.

Until not so long ago most children in Italian primary schools only had a half-day at school. This was changed in 1971 with the gradual introduction of a successful full-time scheme in primary schools, where two, and since the Eighties three, teachers are employed per class. The scheme also allows working-class women with children to have a normal career as their children are at school for the length of most of the working day. All this would be destroyed thanks to the reintroduction of one teacher per class.

An amendment proposed by the far-right Northern League (an influential component of the Berlusconi coalition) has also added a racist and populist content to this vicious attack: they have raised the idea of separate classes for immigrant children, trying to separate them from “pure-blood” Italian children. Even the Catholic Church has had to recognise that this proposal implies the creation of ghettoes in the education system.

It is quite clear that all this is an attempt by the government to cut social spending in a draconian manner. And the students are becoming more and more aware of the fact that all this flows from the general crisis in this system. The link between all these policies and the present crisis of world capitalism did not go unnoticed by the students who wrote on their banners “We won’t pay for your crisis.”