Maybe you have had more success than I, but trying to pinpoint cultural differences continually frustrates me.  I volunteer every Wednesday in a public high school (istituto professionale) and each time I am there I keep trying to figure out exactly what it is that makes Italian istituti e licei nothing like American high schools. First, there is the obvious division between college-track licei and work-track istituti.  Italian high schools are far more targeted than American ones; within the licei there are schools for languages and schools for science, within the istituti there are schools specializing in various trades the one where I spend each Wednesday focuses on tourism. I teach two English classes and plan my lessons around hotels, tourist brochures, and advertising. The structures of the secondary school systems of the two countries are indeed diverse.

But these are the surface differences, ones you can list nicely with bullet points and can understand by reading from a book.  Walking into an Italian istituto is nothing like walking into an American high school. Why? Is what is absent louder than what is present? Are the missing pep rally banners and college posters the difference? Italian schools are minimal: the monotone hallways do not boast the student art and flyers for sports and theatre events that plaster the halls of American schools.  I’ve noticed these physical differences from the first time I walked into the istituto, but the difference between the variations of secondary education is beyond the fact that American classrooms seem always to be swimming in stuff and Italian classrooms contain only desks and a chalkboard.

I think it has something to with the role school plays in the lives of Italians versus Americans.  Italians seem to be less invested in school- both academically and socially. The teachers and students alike brush off incomplete homework assignments, tests are informal, and students seem be overall less interested in what is happening in the school. American schools love extra-curricular everything- sports, clubs, theatre, art, groups of all kinds, student help offices and more.  Italian schools have none of that. Consequently, the lives of Italian students are centered in other parts of the community rather than the school.  Where?  Maybe there isn’t one nucleus of life in Italy comparable to the social center that is the American High school.  Students ask me about the cat-fights, the prom, the football games and all the other aspects of American high school life that they see in movies.  Is it really like that?  I tell them that a lot of the time that is pretty much the status quo. They are incredulous that American students care so much about what happens between the bells.  What we see are the results of two different interpretations on the role of a school in the lives of its students, but maybe what separates the two schools of education is the interpretation itself. Coming from a very American town where high school was indeed the center of the lives of everyone who attended, it is hard to grasp this Italian form of educazione secondaria where the istituto is just a building for classes.