Meloni warns of new rules in schools: legal limit for foreign students and ban on burqa and hijab

A new package of measures for the Italian education system is expected to be reviewed soon by the Council of Ministers, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced.

The proposals foresee the establishment of a legal limit on the number of foreign students in each class, mandatory Italian language lessons for parents of foreign students with serious integration difficulties, as well as the ban on burqas and hijabs in schools.

Meloni said the proposed measure will include all these elements, also requiring that in school premises the faces of female students be uncovered.

According to the prime minister, in Italy the concealment of a young girl in the name of a tradition cannot be justified, regardless of whether it is considered real or supposed. She stressed that gender equality cannot be negotiated, neither on the street nor in schools.

Meloni argued that the measures aim to address integration problems and set the same standards for everyone in the education system.

During her speech, the prime minister also touched on artificial intelligence and the impact it may have on upcoming election campaigns.

“Algorithms can slander you, but they cannot rewrite you,” she declared, warning that ahead of elections there may be increased circulation of manipulated materials and fake content.

She asked citizens not to automatically consider all information that will appear over the next few months as reliable.

Meanwhile, the prime minister denied claims that the government had blocked a bipartisan initiative for a moratorium on social media use by minors.

Meloni said it was not true what, according to her, some left-wing representatives claimed. She clarified that the government had avoided intervening in government initiatives precisely because Parliament was handling the issue.

According to her, protecting minors cannot be the responsibility of families alone. She called on platforms to bear the main burden, as they have the ability to remove many of the mechanisms that create dependency among young people.

Meloni also raised the problem of age verification for social media users. She called for a way that does not force citizens to present identification documents, as such a procedure could lead to “the broadest profiling of citizens ever imagined.”