Abstract

The narrative as well as essayistic representations of school, in contemporary Italy, are here presented as a composite however consistent critique of the principles of the so-called Gelmini Reform: teachers who recount their life experience, and writers who are also school workers, forge unlike (or, otherwise, topical) rhetorical strategies in order to voice their forms of resistance, their will to represent a productive, virtuous part of the nation. This complex of feelings and narrative projects is to be seen as a more general cultural counterstrategy, aimed at contrasting the restrictive depiction of the teaching role, as conceived by the ministerial view.