Learning to learn has no hour on the timetable

Every subject assumes it. No subject teaches it. That gap is where the group works, with students and with the people who teach them.

The ability every subject assumes

A curriculum asks a young person to read something difficult, understand it, organise it and give it back under pressure. Those four operations are the actual work of schooling, they are assessed constantly, and almost nowhere are they taught explicitly. The students who arrive already able to do them are usually the ones who were shown how at home.

The consequence is measurable in adulthood: a share of people who completed their schooling can decode words without reliably reconstructing what a text means. That is what functional illiteracy describes, and it is what happens when the ability underneath every subject is left to be picked up by osmosis. In Italy the same concern sits behind the PNRR measure on territorial gaps and early school leaving (Mission 4, investment 1.4), managed by the Ministry of Education and Merit. We work on that ability directly: how a text is approached, how a concept is defined and distinguished from the one next to it, how material is organised so that it can be retrieved later, how a student notices which of those steps is failing. The institutional track record is public and checkable: in 2022 one of the group’s co-founders was among the first signatories of the Manifesto for the New School promoted through Cultura Italiae, and in 2026 the group contributed methodological work to a conversational agent for teacher training developed with INDIRE, the Italian national institute for educational research. The methodology underlying the courses was developed by CNR-IRPI researchers together with the SaperCapire team, under a licence to use the material and to train the trainers. What follows is what the group does with a school, in general terms. What it would look like in yours depends on the year group, on what has already been tried and on how much time there is, so the practical step is a conversation: the form at the end of this page reaches the people who would do the work.

What we work on with a school

1

With students

Reading a difficult text, understanding it, organising it and giving it back under pressure — worked on as a method, on the material the class already has to study.

2

With teachers

Continuing sessions on classroom management, the educational relationship and communication with families, through the LEARNIS Academy programme for teachers.

3

On terms you can check

Who holds the students' data and for how long, how the person in front of the class was trained and who supervises them, and what is not being promised: no grades, no timeframe, no claim about results.