Mirta Michilli speaks at the CIDI national seminar on schools of equality
How can schools continue to be, today, the main democratic bulwark against inequality? And how are educational divides changing in the age of artificial intelligence, digital platforms and new computational languages?
These are some of the questions at the heart of the national seminar “Tullio De Mauro and the democratic challenge. Schools of equality”, organised by the Centre for Democratic Initiative of Teachers (CIDI), as part of the National Coordination initiative dedicated this year to the linguist, former Minister of Education, founder of CIDI in the 1970s and first president of the Fondazione Mondo Digitale.
The event is scheduled for Friday 8 May at 3.30 pm in the Sala Zuccari of Palazzo Giustiniani, Rome, on the initiative of Senator Cecilia D’Elia. The discussion brings together academics, representatives from the world of education, institutions and educational associations to reflect on the relevance of De Mauro’s thinking today and on the constitutional role of schools as places of equality, participation and citizenship.
Speakers will include Mirta Michilli, Director General of the Fondazione Mondo Digitale, who will speak on the topic “De Mauro, schools and the digital divide”. The discussion will focus on the relationship between democratic language education and new digital skills: because today, tackling inequalities does not simply mean ensuring access to technology, but helping everyone to understand, manage and use it in a critical, creative and responsible manner.
For the Fondazione Mondo Digitale, Tullio De Mauro’s legacy remains a living reference point. His vision of school as a democratic infrastructure of knowledge continues to guide projects, training programmes and initiatives aimed at students, teachers, families and citizens. At a time when artificial intelligence is changing the way we produce texts, information and knowledge, linguistic competence is once again becoming an essential condition of citizenship: knowing how to read, interpret, verify, argue and make sense of things.
The CIDI seminar follows on naturally from the recent RomeCup 2026 event dedicated to Tullio De Mauro, “From natural language to artificial language”, organised by the Fondazione Mondo Digitale at Sapienza University of Rome. On that occasion too, language was at the heart of the discussion as a space for freedom, responsibility and participation: not merely a tool for communication, but a prerequisite for understanding the world and contributing to its transformation [watch the rfull recording on Corriere TV].
From the Foundation’s perspective, the challenge of the digital divide is therefore also a linguistic, educational and democratic challenge. Technologies can expand opportunities and knowledge only if accompanied by a school system capable of including, guiding and developing critical thinking, and making every individual a conscious protagonist of the digital transformation.
