In our tool backpack there is knowledge, not just technology

The concept of “scientific capital”, as defined by Louise Archer, professor of Sociology at UCL, describes a person’s scientific resources. Understanding, knowledge, attitude, activities and social contacts related to science. «Scientific capital» can be thought of as a backpack or a bag. This bag is more or less full by virtue of various factors, first of all the consideration of the role of the sciences — exact sciences, hard sciences or, as is in vogue today, Stem — in the formation of a human being and in his possibilities of interpreting and act in the world in which he lives.

There has been a lot of talk, and there is more and more talk, about the gender gap in science and the gap has often been attributed – as it is – to the lack of encouragement that girls and boys experience at school (“You’re not good at it”, “I’m things for men”). Archer turns the problem around and proposes to act not so much on the insecurity of women, but on the male chauvinist mentality, on the stereotypes and prejudices of men, some of whom teach STEM disciplines in schools of all levels.

Among the experiences built over the years to increase scientific capital, there is one here in Italy Maddmaths! (the dissemination site headed by a mathematician, Roberto Natalini, director of the Iac, the Institute for applications and calculation of the Cnr, who discusses the gender gap in STEM a lot). And there it is The traveling skythe association chaired and co-founded by Ersilia Vaudo-Scarpetta (physicist, working for the European Space Agency) which, through campuses with students who use the first laboratory that human beings had at their disposal, the starry sky, seeks to make mathematics relevant in the lives of students and to use it as a language that bridges linguistic gaps in neighborhoods with a high rate of immigration (therefore with possible enormous linguistic gaps).

On the same day that Archer – at the Ogr, in Turin – addressed issues of democracy and Stem (economic, gender and linguistic inequalities), the minister Sangiuliano, in Rome, celebrated the issue, by the Ministry of Enterprise and Made in Italy, of the commemorative stamp of Giovanni Gentile, eighty years after his death. That Giovanni Gentile, a philosopher, has a stamp is beautiful, but that in the celebration of this beauty it is not remembered how much – beauty, moreover, is varied and contradictory – Gentile’s scholastic reform relegated all the sciences to the confines of technology and not in that of knowledge, it seems to me to be a serious signal with respect to the rethinking of school policies and reforms that bring the sciences back into the equipment – capital, Archer would say – of a human being of this era, and the next ones. Without the admission of Croce and Gentile’s error, we will not be able to correct it, and we will not be able to build a society with greater equality.