A School Decree Reaches Sardinia, Where the Classroom Was Already Empty

The Italian government has adopted a decree law banning burqas and niqabs in schools and capping the number of pupils with a poor command of Italian in any one class, according to the BBC and Deutsche Welle. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni described the measures as "common-sense tools that do not divide but really help to integrate", the BBC reported. The New York Times said critics accused her of trying to appease anti-immigrant sentiment, while the Guardian reported that opponents accused her of "running scared" and of courting far-right voters before next year's general election.

The decree's two halves work on different logics. The face-covering ban is a symbolic prohibition with almost no practical application in most Italian schools, including Sardinia's. The classroom cap is the operative measure: it sets a ceiling on how many pupils without fluent Italian a school may enrol in a single class, which in practice constrains where newly arrived migrant children can be placed.

Seen from Cagliari and the interior, the cap addresses a pressure the island largely does not feel. Sardinia's schools are closing for the opposite reason. The region's population is around 1.58 million and falling; its birth rate is among the lowest in a country with one of the lowest in Europe. Village primary schools in the Ogliastra and the Barbagia have shut in recent years for want of pupils, not for want of Italian.

That divergence is the island's real stake in the decree. A rule designed for dense mainland classrooms — where a single school may absorb dozens of non-Italian-speaking children in one year — lands on a region where the arrival of any child at all can keep a classroom open. The foreign coverage does not address this asymmetry; it reports a national integration debate, and the island reads it at a remove.