Meloni’s burqa ban won’t fix Italy’s struggling schools

When I was around seven or eight, a new girl joined our class. Natthaya had just arrived from Thailand and didn't speak a word of Italian. Our teacher sat her next to me: the two foreigners, she reasoned, could help each other better than anyone else could.

She was wrong about one thing. I was born and raised in Italy, Italian was my mother tongue, and although I didn't have citizenship, I was as Italian as everyone else in that room.

Nevertheless, Natthaya and I shared something hard to put into words: an understanding of what migration does to a family. It bonded us. It also made us work twice as hard as everyone else, and we both excelled in every subject, Italian included.

Today's Italy looks very different. Back then, we were the only two "immigrants" in the school. Now, in most cities, many classrooms include children of the "second generation." Italy exports young, skilled people, yet it has also become home to migrants from all over the world. That has brought real challenges, which apply serious pressure on schools. Teachers in concentrated classrooms are stretched, and a child who can't follow the lesson is left behind.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has warned of "ghetto classes" in which limited Italian proficiency apparently holds back learning. But her solution is a decree-law banning burqas and niqabs in schools and capping students without an adequate command of Italian at just 30% per classroom, starting next year. She calls it "common sense."

Meloni’s timing, however, is no coincidence. With elections approaching and far-right populists gaining ground, this looks more like propaganda rather than a genuine policy aimed at protecting pupils.

This statement by the PM, which she made at an event organised by the youth wing of Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy), also manufactures Otherness.

"It cannot be that in an Italian classroom it is Italian children who feel left out because they have become the minority," Meloni added. What a convenient form of division. She paints a picture in which the Italian children on one side of the classroom must be protected. On the other side sit the rest, whose presence is the threat.

Terms like "ghetto classes" turn children into a problem to be solved: an obstacle, a foreign body, an element of disruption. It immediately draws a line between "us" and "them".

"Foreign" is also a slippery word. A large share of pupils with non-Italian citizenship were born in Italy, speak with a Milanese or Roman accent, and have never lived anywhere else. Italy's citizenship law, whose path to naturalisation is among the strictest in Europe, produces these outsiders. And now it seems the school system will sort them by the label.

The measures themselves are weak. The non-binding rule on non-Italian students per class already existed under a 2010 circular issued by then education minister Mariastella Gelmini, and critics note that the decree changes little beyond making it compulsory. According to experts and a Reuters analysis of public data, the rules will affect at most "just a few hundred children nationwide.”

The burqa ban exposes the whole exercise. Burqas and niqabs are extremely rare in Italy; estimates in the Italian press put the number of women wearing them at 500-600. Children don't wear them. The only adults affected are a handful of mothers, who will now be fined up to $1,140 for entering a building where their children are educated.

A law against such a tiny portion of the country is another way of reinforcing that the veiled woman is a symbol of an unassimilable minority, which will certainly serve far-right politicians in the next election.

For years, I have watched this caricature referenced constantly on Italian talk shows.

The underlying problem is real, but the remedy is not. Instead of investing in Italian courses, crumbling school buildings, high textbook costs and teachers' salaries that are among the lowest in Europe, Meloni's government has chosen to scapegoat vulnerable children. It ignores a simple truth that "ghetto classes" are the product of poverty, not of an invasion of migrants intent on replacing "Italians."

The latest decree masks the government's shortcomings and its failure to address the real crisis in the education sector. Once again, migrants and their children pay the price for a state's failure to fix structural problems.

A wave of far-right victories in Europe

What is playing out in Italy has not happened in a vacuum. On 6 September, the far-right party AfD had a significant victory in the Saxony-Anhalt election in Germany’s eastern state. In France, the far right led by Marine Le Pen is currently leading in the polls for the upcoming presidential elections. Over the coming months, elections are also due in Italy, Finland, Greece, Poland, Slovakia, and Spain, where far-right parties are expected to do well.

Populists are increasingly setting the terms of the debate, and centre-right governments seem to think that if they cannot beat the radical right, they should imitate it.

In Italy, for example, far-right Italian politician Roberto Vannacci has built a brand on harder-edged migration rhetoric, and every headline he earns makes Meloni look like the establishment. Vannacci is a former army general who self-published a book rife with racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism, and whose party’s popularity in polls keeps increasing.

The latest burqa ban is therefore a response to Vannacci and his ilk, and clearly seeks to galvanise hard-right voters ahead of next year's general election.

I wrote L'Occidente è morto a Gaza (The West has died in Gaza) because I became convinced that European discourse about Muslims and the Middle East/ SWANA region runs on a double standard. We are invited to see Muslim identity as a threat to liberal, secular values, even as the tools used to defend those values grow steadily more repressive.

A state that dictates how a woman may dress, and sorts children by perceived fluency, is certainly not defending liberal values.

For a child in the Italian education system, the message lands before any statute is read. Your future will be decided by a quota. The teacher may be kind and the school wonderful, but the country has told you in advance that too many people like you are a problem.

Solving Italy’s language and integration challenge would mean investing in well-paid specialist teachers, providing resources to the schools that need them most, and supporting families.

More importantly, it would mean recognising pupils as assets to the country, rather than a threat to its classrooms.

Randa Ghazy is an Italian Egyptian journalist and writer based in London. She has published several books with Italian publisher Rizzoli, including "Dreaming of Palestine" at the age of 15, which has been translated into 16 languages. She has worked as a TV producer at Pan-Arab network Al Araby TV, and led the Gaza media response at Save the Children International, where she held the role of Middle East, North Africa and Eastern Europe Media Manager.

Follow Randa on X: @ghazy_r on Instagram: @randa_ghazy

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