Understanding the current state of our education system, in order to face its challenges, requires an initial insight into the complex reality affecting the planet (Milani, 2020; Santerini, 2021). Urgent reasons for apprehension of the frequent attempts to take away human and minority rights are the homolesbobitransfobic aggressions and the threat to the freedom of the press, also because the clear feeling is that there are enough political forces, mainly of the extreme right-wing, that are trying to crumble the democratic systems that represent what still remains of the original Europeanist design (Rete nazionale per il contrasto ai discorsi e ai fenomeni d’odio, 2024). The scholastic world is not exempt from these turbulences, not least because of the heavy scars of the Covid-19 lockdown, which has exacerbated the vortexes of hate speech (Montero et al., 2022). The new generations are launching, especially in schools, a desperate call for help that increasingly takes the form of cyberbullying and even physical and verbal aggression against teachers (Chello, 2022). The school institution is in fact called upon not only to be concerned with education (Dewey, 1951), but also to be open to the world and, at the same time, to take action to promote educational paths in relation to the cultural and training needs of society (Westley & Antadze, 2010). However, schools cannot transform themselves into an all-encompassing educational agency capable of solving the multiple problems afflicting the hyperglobalised world, including the growing waves of racism also justified by the difficulties of states in managing migratory phenomena (Cambi, 2006). Incitement to hate speech concerning gender, religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation is becoming a global issue (Crescenza, 2024). And hate speech manifests itself in the misleading form of free considerations that conciliate people, creating fake news, resorting to conservative value systems, demonising the Other (Kang, 2020), often if he or she belongs to minorities, and feeding fear-based narratives (Fiorucci, 2019). The harm caused to network users is wide-ranging and includes not only the violation of basic personal rights, but also the impact on physical and mental well-being, and digital violence can often be considered the stage before offline physical one (Topidi & Malkmus, 2024). To investigate the issue of preventing and combating hate speech, violence and exclusion, the contribution presents the first data emerging from a quanti-qualitative questionnaire, which is currently being administered in six secondary schools. The questionnaire is part of the research project entitled “Networked hate speech and pedagogical perspectives: perceptions, experiences and educational practices in Italian schools” developed within the doctorate in “Intercultural and Historical Transferences in Medieval Mediterreanean Europe” of the Alicante University in international jointly supervision with the doctorate in “Educational and Social Theory and Research” of Roma Tre University. The project deals with the topic of hate speech and its aim is to explore the students’ level of awareness, perception and involvement in hate speech, discrimination and exclusion dynamics, in order to identify effective educational strategies for preventing and combating these phenomena. Specifically, the questionnaire, with a view to investigating the level of awareness of students regarding the phenomenon of hate speech, both in general and within the school walls, is divided into sub-objectives aimed at understanding: prejudices on the most vulnerable categories (e.g. women and foreign immigrants), the use of hate speech also through the use and abuse of social media; the narration of direct or indirect experiences of hate speech at school and the resulting reactions; the evaluation of the proposal to establish the teaching of sexual-affective education in Italian schools.

The questionnaire aims at exploring the cultural, educational and social dimensions related to hate speech, violence and exclusion by means of a questionnaire whose reasoned choice sampling concerns approximately 2000 students of the fourth and fifth grade (average age 17-18 years). Indeed, in order to have a national representativeness, the students belong to two secondary schools for each of the three Italian metropolitan provinces chosen (Bari, Rome, Milan), which meet the survey’s aims as they have similar socio-cultural and anthropic characteristics, but different economic contexts. Before being administered, the questionnaire was validated by five professors of Pedagogy from Italian universities, including full and associate professors, with clear methodological skills and consolidated knowledge of the subject. The questions, divided into five thematic-cultural areas, provide an overview of the students’ perceptions and experiences: 1. Personal and school data, to contextualise the results in relation to the geographical distribution, type of school and personal characteristics of the students; 2. Knowledge and awareness of the phenomenon, to analyse levels of information on the effects of hate speech and its relation to discrimination, bullying and crime; 3. Perception of vulnerable groups, with a focus on stereotypes related to gender, sexual orientation, ethnic and religious affiliation and socio-economic conditions; 4. Personal and school experiences, to investigate the frequency of discriminatory incidents and how students and schools react and intervene; 5. Evaluation of educational policies and practices, with a focus on the usefulness of cooperative teaching activities, social-affective education and the responsible use of social media. Being a quanti-qualitative questionnaire (Cohen et al. 2007), there are 28 items with closed stimulus/closed response, closed stimulus/open response and open stimulus/open response. The items with closed stimulus/closed response provide for a single response to be chosen from among those proposed also by means of indicating the level of appreciation of the proposed reflections with a scale of values from 1 to 4 with the relative options “not at all”, “a little”, “quite a lot” and “very much”. The data collection, which will cover approximately 105 classes, is scheduled to take place in January and February 2025 using the LimeSurvey platform, which enables the analysis of data from closed stimulus/closed response and closed stimulus/open response items with the help of different types of graphs.

An initial partial analysis of the responses received reveals some salient data. The three words most used to discriminate are “nigger”, “gay” and “disabled”. Concerning prejudices related to immigrant foreigners, women and the LGBT+ community, it emerges that: some students believe that immigrants take jobs away from Italians; a small but significant proportion believe that women should not enjoy the same rights as men; almost half consider people belonging to the LGBT+ community to be against nature and confused. Most think, however, that the introduction of sexual-affective education (still absent from school curricula) is indispensable to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies and help young people establish healthy emotional relationships. From a pedagogical point of view, the expected results offer insights for: - Strengthening the role of schools as educating communities, capable of facing the challenges of diversity and democratic coexistence; - Designing targeted educational interventions, especially for adolescents (Bilz et al., 2024), that integrate ethical and affective dimensions to counter exclusion and violence and foster a cultural change that favours the conviviality of differences. The answers to the questionnaire highlight the urgency of a holistic educational approach (Chiosso et al., 2021) and the repercussions of this survey go beyond the school context: the data collected will be able to inform broad educational policies that contribute to outlining a model of the school as an educating community, capable of countering phenomena of exclusion and building spaces for dialogue, inclusion and solidarity (Bauman, 2008). The ultimate goal is to: promote a cultural change that recognises diversity as a value; foster a social justice not limited to the transmission of knowledge but called to the construction of an active and supportive citizenship (Ortega-Sánchez et al., 2021) capable of counteracting the dynamics of hate speech and exclusion at an individual and social level.

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