Preschool: how kindergarten shapes children's sense of justice and fairness

That this type of intervention must be early was already understood some time ago by Nobel Prize winner James Heckman, according to whom investment between the ages of zero and six is not only important because it increases human capital as measured by tests, but above all because it acts when skills, including social and emotional skills, are most malleable and because the gaps between privileged and disadvantaged emerge very early, fuelled by the quality of the environments in which each child is born and grows up. Heckman also insists on another, politically relevant point. The quality of educational intervention is not always a function of financial investment. It is the quality of contexts and relationships with teachers and within families that makes the difference, not the money spent on infrastructure and equipment. The scarce resource - Heckman writes provocatively - is not money itself but 'love and parenting', that is, the quality of the affective and educational environment.

If we put these elements together - what emerges from the social preference experiment and Heckman's theory of skill formation - the message that emerges is clear: preschool is one of the few public policies that can affect inequalities 'before' they become a destiny and, at the same time, the kind of society in which those same children will live as adults.

In Italia, 1.3 million children live in conditions of absolute poverty, in families, that is, that cannot afford the essential expenses to maintain a minimally acceptable standard of living. What are the implications of this situation on the future of those children? Paul Tough speaks, by the way, of adversity. The idea that stress, precariousness and insecurity change, very early on, the self-regulating abilities of boys and girls. Growing up in harsh or unpredictable contexts, neuroscience now clearly tells us, produces biological changes that impair the development of mental capacities crucial for the regulation of emotions and thoughts, with very serious consequences on learning. And if adversity erodes self-regulation, it also risks eroding, or distorting, the ability to cooperate, to trust, to share. This is not because children growing up in disadvantaged contexts are 'worth less' or are 'worse', but because fate and the environment in which they live have driven them to adopt, very early on, a defensive logic, a survival mode. And so the kindergarten, when it works well, can become not only a place of learning, but a device of stability. A context where one learns that rules are not arbitrary, that the other is not always a threat, that one can wait one's turn without feeling like a loser.

The results of the research by Cappelen and his colleagues re-propose a lesson that, after all, Don Lorenzo Milani tried to teach us many years ago. School is not only the transmission of content. It is first and foremost a workshop of belonging. When Don Milani writes Letter to a teacher and does it together with his 'boys' he frees them from being 'objects' and makes them co-authors of a path. And 'co-authors' already means citizens. It means learning the grammar of reciprocity early on. If the American study shows that kindergarten and family significantly influence the way children weigh fairness and efficiency, Don Milani reminds us what the desirable horizon is: a school that does not prematurely separate the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving', but widens the perimeter of 'us', precisely where social origin can inescapably condition the future.

So what does an investment in zero-six education bring? Not just custodial hours. Not just an 'advance' in cognitive skills. We are, in fact, laying the foundations of a society in which justice becomes an early habit. All well, then? Unfortunately, no. There are several knots to untie, preliminarily. The first is that of universalism, the real one, not the proclaimed one. Because access to zero-six services is not a neutral matter: it decides who enters early in an environment where rules are shared, shifts count, the other person's word counts, and who arrives later, when the common language is already partly consolidated. If crèches and pre-schools remain unequal in availability and accessibility - territorially, economically, culturally - the educational transition risks becoming a 'two-speed policy' that sees some children learning early on that the world is a relatively reliable and cooperative place, and others learning early on that they have to make do. And this does not only translate into vocabulary or numerical skills, but above all into trust, reciprocity, the ability to ascribe benevolent intentions, a willingness to share.

The second knot is even more delicate because it is not enough to have a physical place to take children, it matters what happens inside that place. When Heckman insists on early skill formation and Tough talks about how environmental stability influences self-regulation, the implicit lesson is that the zero-six school must not just be a container; it must be an environment that builds predictability, continuity, reliable relationships. For a child, educational quality is often indistinguishable from relational quality, which is why it cannot be 'more', but must be substance. A well-designed context serves not only to teach colours and words, it serves to make one experience the fact that rules are not arbitrary, that waiting makes sense, that conflict can be composed without humiliation, that the other is not necessarily a threat. If this experience is missing, or worse, if it is replaced by hasty routines, continuous turnover, organisational fragility, the school fails to perform that stabilising function that for many children, especially those most exposed to insecurity, is essential.

And then there is the third knot, that of the complex relationship with families. Here the most common error is twofold and symmetrical. On the one hand, the idea that the school must 'remedy' families seen as obstacles and brakes; on the other, the idea that the family must defend itself from the school, perceived as intrusive or judgmental. And instead, if we take seriously both what research says about parent-mediated interventions and the pedagogical tradition of Don Milani, we understand that the issue is not to choose between school and family, but to build a continuum, a plot in which no one is moralised and no one is left alone. 'Support for parenthood' should not mean lessons from above or lists of correct behaviour. It should, rather, mean accompaniment, concrete tools, educating communities, especially where material and psychological conditions make continuity more difficult.

If we consider these three planes together - real access, relational quality, non-judgmental alliance - we can clearly see how the zero-six policy should stop being thought of as an expenditure chapter and become a structural policy of citizenship. An investment that pays for itself over time. Because early education does not only serve to 'get some children off to an early start', but to ensure that society, tomorrow, has more people capable of thinking of justice not as a concession, but as the natural criterion of living together.

And perhaps it is here that the discourse returns, almost inevitably, to Barbiana. Not out of nostalgia, but out of lucidity. Because the idea that no one should be left behind is not built with a moral appeal addressed to adults. It is built when you are three or four years old and you learn, in the concrete of everyday life and in the dimension of small things, that the voice of the other counts as much as your own. After all, this is what is at stake in the zero-six school: not only academic success, but the shape of our 'we'.

There is no truly inclusive growth if, from the very beginning, we do not educate ourselves to think that no one is 'too much'. A message that became a living experience on the hills of Barbiana. Our challenge today is not just to celebrate that experience with words, but to put it to work now, before inequalities become even more corrosive and unsustainable.