Rome, June 25, 2023 – A teacher high school history and philosophy she was absent for a total of 20 years out of 24 years. Now him Cassation confirmed the dismissal of the teacher
the teacher’s story
In just four straight months that she was engaged in the class, the teacher caused the students to complain about her. “lack of preparation”, the “randomness” in the assignment of notes, appearing without textbooks. This triggers the ministerial inspection that defines his teaching method as “incompatible with teaching”. Now the Cassation has confirmed the dismissal of this professor sealed by “permanent and utter ineptitude” despite the ‘teacher’s’ attempt to refer to “teaching freedom”.
What did the Supreme Court decide?
“There teaching freedom in the school environment – underlines the Cassation that rejected the teacher’s appeal against the ministry – it is understood as direct and functional teaching autonomy for a full formation of the personality of the students, holders of a real right to study”. “Therefore, freedom is not an end in itself, but its exercise – continues the verdict of the Labor Section 17897 – through the didactic autonomy of the individual teacher, constitutes the way to guarantee the right to study of each student and Ultimately, the full formation of the personality of the students”.
In the opinion of the ‘ermines’, therefore, the concept of didactic freedom “certainly includes autonomy in the choice of appropriate didactic methods”, but this “does not mean that the teacher cannot apply any method or that he can do not organize and do not structure the lessons”.
The MIUR inspection
During the three-day inspection carried out by the Miur, requested by the director of the Chioggia secondary school where the teacher -recipient of annual allowances as the wife of a Guardia di Finanza officer- was on duty, it was learned that the teacher was inattentive “to the students during their questions” as the intention of a “Continuous use of mobile phone with messaging”. In one class, he had used photos from textbooks that were used for testing in another class. While she was asking, it happened that she would start talking to a different student that she had to answer to.
In short, the monitoring of the three provincials sent by the Miur, carried out in March 2013, culminated in the “consensus judgment” on the “absence of sustainable criteria in the attribution of grades, the lack of clarity and confusion in the explanations, improvisation, servile reading of the student’s borrowed textbook, the absence of a logical thread in the sequence of lessons, the attribution of grades in an extemporaneous and humorous way, the bad way of organizing and preparing tests”.
The degrees of judgment
Therefore, the Cassation confirmed the dismissal, as already established by the Court of Appeal of Venice in 2021. In the first instance, however, the In 2018, the Court declared the measure illegitimate dismissal on the grounds that despite the teacher’s “disorganization and carelessness”, the three-day inspection was “too brief” an observation period to certify “absolute and permanent ineptitude”.
