Teacher sends the best ones on a trip, but CERN Geneva then invites the excluded ones too

An 'exclusive' trip to CERN in Geneva, reserved by the mathematics teacher of a Piacenza middle school only for students who had obtained the highest marks in his subject. From Switzerland, however, comes an invitation to the excluded students to visit the world's largest particle physics laboratory. The case had been raised in recent days on the pages of the daily Libertà di Piacenza by the mother of a student who had not participated in the visit. The visit to the European particle physics laboratory took place at the end of February with only six students, despite the fact that the initiative had been much more popular.

The mother who reported the incident claims to have learnt with 'no little surprise' about the trip to CERN from an article published in the same 'Libertà' when she believed that the idea of the field trip launched by the teacher had been dropped. In fact, it appears that in the previous days, the headmaster had vetoed this possibility in view of another school trip already organised in Naples. The teacher's firm desire to take the students to CERN in any case would therefore have led to a selection of participants based on academic performance in mathematics. To the great disappointment of a group of parents. The mother of an excluded pupil wrote to the newspaper and the school authorities. 'This initiative was laudable in itself,' the woman explained, but the decision to exclude the children concerned with low grades 'goes against the inclusion criteria that the ministry and the school itself would like to promote'.

Such a choice, according to the woman, would have done nothing but demotivate the boys as well as creating real discrimination. Vincenzo Vagnoni, a researcher at the Bologna section of Infn (the National Institute of Nuclear Physics), took it upon himself to put things right: 'I would be pleased to personally invite the excluded boys and, if they wish, their families too. I would be the tour guide for the visit,' he wrote in an e-mail addressed to the newspaper after learning of the news. Vagnoni is currently in charge of one of the four large experiments at the particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (Lhc), located at the Geneva headquarters of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). The children excluded from the first trip will therefore also have the opportunity to meet him.