YOU MIGHT think the last thing Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi needs at the moment is a row on education. Yet, at the end of a month marked by nationwide student protests against a package of reforms and cuts proposed by Italian education minister Maria-stella Gelmini, the prime minister seems headed for further heated debate on education issues.
This time, the debate is focused on how to deal with the 574,000 immigrant children, representing 6.4 per cent of the total, who attend Italian primary and secondary schools.
Last month, Mr Berlusconi's political allies, the federalist Northern League, sparked off a bitter debate by passing a measure in parliament that is intended to set up a system of parallel classes for immigrant children whose knowledge of and ability to speak Italian are considered inadequate.
In effect, immigrant children would not be allowed into a mainstream class until "they have passed tests and specific evaluations" on the Italian language.
The centre-left opposition, trade unionists and even senior Catholic Church figures immediately condemned the measure, arguing that it smacked of racism rather than of its alleged intended aim, namely integration.
"As an Italian I find it intolerable that the House passed a measure which establishes separate classes for the children of immigrants. We Italians have been immigrants and we would not have wanted our children put into separate classes," said centre-left opposition leader Walter Veltroni of the Democratic Party, who promised that his party would do everything possible to stop the measure becoming law.
CGIL trade union leader Guglielmo Epifani said the measure recalled the "dark aspects of apartheid", while the influential Catholic news weekly, Famiglia Cristiana, argued that the "bridging classes" called for in the measure would in reality become "ghetto classes".
Not daunted by such criticism, Mr Berlusconi confirmed last week that the government intended to go ahead with the scheme.
"I don't think this is a discriminatory measure; rather it is logical and necessary for both teachers and pupils," he said.
"A poor knowledge of Italian means that foreign children do three times worse than Italian ones and that's why we proposed this measure, following the example of other countries, not to create separate classes but rather classes for the teaching of Italian."