Posted by Izzy Lewis on Wednesday, May 24, 2017 in 2017 Blog post.

For my interview, I spoke to Marisa, who works in the Culturforum Italian language learning center in Cefalù. Marisa lived in the Netherlands until she was 10, when she moved with her Sicilian family back to Cefalù. When she first came to Sicily, she was quick to notice how different Sicilian behavior is. In her experience, Sicilians are more friendly and welcoming, more real and less shiny. Marisa works five days a week from eight in the morning to about six, with breaks in the afternoon. She attended a language-based school for high school, and later worked while studying in university. Since she worked for many ours in a travel agency, she was not able to study as much as she would have otherwise.

Since Marisa teaches language and culture, I asked her about the school system in Sicily. Like with her overall impression, she found schools in Sicily to be very different. Sadly, she found Sicilian schools to be inferior to the schools in the Netherlands, especially in the wide disparities in the quality of schools.

When I asked if she would change anything about Sicilian schools, Marisa said she would change a lot. There is not a lot of opportunity in Sicily for the best schooling. Even if someone studied at the best universities for medicine and engineering in Palermo, he or she would still need to go to northern Italy or other countries to be taken seriously in the profession. Marisa also believes in a more interactive style of teaching, instead of the reading-from-textbooks approach that many older Sicilian teachers use.

In response to my question about technology, Marisa had many interesting insights. She thinks that technology is great, especially for education. However, not everybody knows how to use the internet correctly. In her experience, many people look up things only to click the first link that shows up, which can lead to incorrect answers. So even though technology is beneficial, it also increases difficulties in getting the best information, unlike the trustworthy encyclopedias of the past.

Sicily’s differences in education compared to the rest of Italy and Europe reflects its unique history and situation. With the corruption of politics, education is not a topic in the government’s agenda. Like Marisa, I hope that in the future more work will be done to make schools equal in quality of education.

Interview recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3ZWYelPSIkLM2JRR0RRM3p2UGc/view?usp=sharing