5 assaults on teachers per month says Valditara

(ANSA) - ROME, MAY 31 - There have been about five assaults on teachers per month since the beginning of the current school year and almost half have involved other adults, Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara said on Wednesday after the knife attack on a teacher by a 16-year-old student at a school near Milan on Monday.
    "This implies that families have become estranged from schools, (it is) a tension that needs to be resolved," said the minister during a recording of the flagship talk show Porta a Porta on Rai 1.
    "I am a great believer in a relationship that empowers children and considers parents not as union representatives for their kids but as co-authors of an educational path that is supportive" of the teaching profession, continued Valditara, adding that the authority and social importance of teachers needs to be put back at center stage.
    "Today I visited the Garibaldi Institute in Rome, and I met many motivated children, full of enthusiasm," said the minister.
    "In a dramatic moment such as this, I would not like the message to be that our young people all have problems, while (in reality) Italian schools are made up of many wonderful kids," said Valditara, adding that Monday's episode in Abbiategrasso in which the assailant also turned a replica gun on his classmates before being arrested was "something different from bullying".
    Bullying is a problem in all European countries and it is "an expression of a society that has lost the culture of respect and cultivates arrogance and high-handedness," he added. (ANSA).