Family and School Together in Italian Multicultural Society

This paper presents a reading intended to reflect to joint responsibility between family and school in Italian multicultural society. A discussion of educational joint responsibility between family and school gives us an opportunity to look at specific responsibilities, recognizing each party’s role in education in the light of recent social changes. Many psycho-pedagogical theories developed over the past thirty years have highlighted the significance of the positive presence of parents in the school in terms of children’s learning, personal growth, and socialization. Given the new multicultural scenario of our society, the relationship between school and family takes on a new role in terms of intercultural integration. The integration of immigrant families in society can take place in various ways and with the help of different public entities: among these, the school is surely one of the most important for the immigrant family with children. The school, with a view toward cooperating with the family, must further the rapport with foreign families, taking into account their objective difficulties with language comprehension and their different conception of the relationship to the school; at the same time such families’ differences and their participation in scholastic life can be viewed as an added value in the Italian school. The school can become a meeting point, a place for families to exchange ideas, an active workshop in which values can be shared and the barrier of cultural prejudice can be broken down, embracing diversity as a paradigm of the school’s very identity in pluralism, as an opportunity to open the entire system to differences: of origin, gender, social level, scholastic background.