Dicembre 2016 e ditoriale

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Nuova Secondaria - n. 4 2016 - Anno XXXIV - ISSN 1828-4582

following:  “If the situation does not change, every new

generation will decrease by 40% in comparison with the

one that preceded it”. The seventh question, asking what

the “grey vote” is (line 31) and the reason why it is so

powerful, implies, as it was said before, the correct in-

terpretation of the word ‘grey’, which is a metonymy

based on the use of a quality (the grey colour of the hair)

to label those who are supposed to possess it, i.e. the eld-

erly. So, the grey vote is the vote of the elderly, which is

influential because the majority of the population of many

European countries are elderly, and it is therefore their

vote that determines the results of elections. Question 8,

asking what many villages in Galicia look like now, finds

its answer in the tenth paragraph: “In Galicia, where al-

most half of the abandoned villages of Spain are located,

there are more than 1,500 settlements – once home to

schools, services and businesses – that have been aban-

doned and are now totally empty and neglect.” Question

9 focuses on the strategies Galicia has tried in order to

tackle the demographic issue: the region has tried to solve

the problem by promoting home and transport subsidies

for families and encouraging women to have children

through radio advertisements. The answer to question 10

(“According to Portuguese Prime Minister Coelho, how

long do southern European countries have to react to the

critical demographic situation if it is to be changed?”) is

in the last paragraph: “In order to avert the demographic

disaster and reverse the negative tendencies, solutions

must be found and the necessary actions must be under-

taken in the next 10 to 15 years”. 

The composition

Students are required to write a composition of about 300

words choosing one of the two outlines provided. The first

one reports some statistics about the median age in Eu-

rope, which from 1990 to 2013 has shifted from 35.2 to

41.9 years old, and asks students to illustrate how this can

affect them as young Europeans. To help students with the

composition as a classroom activity, they could be asked

to illustrate the possible needs, goals and achievements of

the young and the old, to evaluate whether the results of

one side are compatible with those of the other, and to pre-

dict what kinds of adaptations will be necessary in the

three fields, considering that the elderly will represent the

majority of the population, and how these changes will af-

fect young people’s plans and professional perspectives.

The second question asks students to report their own

thoughts and experiences on the way they relate to older

people: being a rather subjective topic, students may re-

quire a certain degree of maturity in order to write a good

essay. An interesting lead-in activity could be to watch a

video recorded by CBS Radio and available on YouTube

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sycgL3Qg_Ak) in

which people of all ages give their words of wisdom to

other people of all ages. Before watching the video, stu-

dents could be asked to imagine the kind of advice they

will receive in the video, and after watching it they should

compare the advice received with their expectations, and

imagine what kind of experience led the people inter-

viewed to give those pieces of advice. This would be help-

ful for students, allowing them to evaluate the extent to

which they already understand older people’s point of

view and where differences lie. 

Elisabetta Saleri 

Liceo Linguistico Paritario “A. Luzzago”

Università Cattolica di Brescia

The essay

The second text proposed for analysis, from the field of so-

cio-historical studies, is an extract from the book “On His-

tory”, a collection of Essays and Lectures on the theo-

rization of history published by the British historian Eric

J. Hobsbawm in 1997. The text was taken from the sec-

ond chapter of the book, “The sense of the past”, and is

about the acceptance of innovation and its relationship

with the past. When innovation represents “progress”,

the problem of rejecting the past could arise, which leads

to two questions: the first is on the legitimation of inno-

vation and the second on the necessity of specifying nov-

Inglese - Storico-sociale

Elisabetta Saleri

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Nuova Secondaria - n. 4 2016 - Anno XXXIV - ISSN 1828-4582

The problem of systematically rejecting the past arises only when in-

novation is recognized both as inescapable and as socially desirable:

when it represents “progress”. This raises two distinct questions, how

innovation as such is recognized and legitimized, and how the situa-

tion arising from it is to be specified (that is how a model of society

is to be formulated when the past can no longer provide it). The for-

mer is more easily answered. We know very little about the process

which has turned the words “new” and “revolutionary” (as used in the

language of advertising) into synonyms for “better” and “more de-

sirable”, and research is badly needed here. However, it would seem

that novelty or even constant innovation is more readily accepted as

far as it concerns the human control over non-human nature, for ex-

ample science and technology, since so much of it is obviously ad-

vantageous even to the most tradition-bound. Has there ever been a se-

rious example of Luddism directed against bicycles or transistor

radios? On the other hand, while certain socio-political innovations

may appear attractive to some groups of human beings, at least

prospectively, the social and human implications of innovation (in-

cluding technical innovation) tend to meet with greater resistance, for

equally obvious reasons. Rapid and constant change in material tech-

nology may be hailed by the very people who are profoundly upset by

the experience of rapid change in human (for example sexual and fam-

ily) relations, and who might actually find it hard to conceive of con-

stant change in such relations. Where even palpably “useful” material

innovation is rejected, it is generally, perhaps always, because of the

fear of the social innovation, that is disruption, it entails.

Innovation which is so obviously useful and socially neutral that it is

accepted almost automatically, at all events by people to whom tech-

nological change is familiar, raises virtually no problem of legitima-

tion.

One would guess (but has the subject actually been investigated?) that

even so traditionalist an activity as popular institutional religion has

found little difficulty in accepting it. We know of violent resistance to

any change in the ancient holy texts, but there appears to have been

no equivalent resistance to, say, the cheapening of holy images and

icons by means of modern technological processes, such as prints and

oleographs. On the other hand certain innovations require legitimation,

and in periods when the past ceases to provide any precedent for them,

this raises very grave difficulties. A single dose of innovation, how-

ever great, is not so troublesome. It can be presented as the victory of

some permanent positive principle over its opposite, or as a process

of “correction” or “rectification”, reason prevailing over unreason,

knowledge over ignorance, “nature” over the “unnatural”, good over

evil. But the basic experience of the past two centuries has been con-

stant and continued change, which cannot be so dealt with except

sometimes, at the cost of considerable casuistry, as the constantly nec-

essary application of permanent principles to circumstances ever

changing in ways which remain rather mysterious, or by exaggerat-

ing the strength of the surviving forces of evil.

Paradoxically, the past remains the most useful analytical tool for

coping with constant change, but in a novel form. It turns into the dis-

covery of history as a process of directional change, of development

or evolution. Change thus becomes its own legitimation, but it is

thereby anchored to a transformed “sense of the past”. Bagehot’s

Physics and Politics (1872) is a good nineteenth-century example of

this; current concepts of “modernization” illustrate more simple-

minded versions of the same approach. In brief, what legitimates the

present and explains it is not now the past as a set of reference points

(for example Magna Carta), or even as duration (for example the age

of parliamentary institutions) but the past as a process of becoming the

present. Faced with the overriding reality of change, even conservative

thought becomes historicist. Perhaps, because hindsight is the most per-

suasive form of the historian’s wisdom, it suits them better than most.

But what of these who also require foresight to specify a future which

is unlike anything in the past? [...]

Some sort of historicism, that is the more or less sophisticated and

complex extrapolation of past tendencies into the future, has been the

most convenient and popular method of prediction. At all events the

shape of the future is discerned by searching the process of past de-

velopment for clues, so that paradoxically, the more we expect inno-

vation, the more history becomes essential to discover what it will be

like.

(754 words)

Eric Hobsbawm, On History, Orion Books, 2010, 

(first ed. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997). 

https://books.google.it/books?id=WVuIyMVegT8C&printsec=

copyright&hl=it#v=onepage&q&f=false

TRACCIA MINISTERIALE

elties that have no model in the past. Innovation is easier

to accept when it allows humans to gain control over

non-human things, but when it entails social disruption it

becomes difficult to accept. If evolution is useful and so-

cially neutral, there’s no obstacle to their acceptance and

legitimation, but if legitimation is necessary the absence

of precedents in the past represents a problem. Single in-

novations, however great, are seen as the prevalence of the

positive over its antithesis, but in the last two centuries

change has been so constant that it has not been easy to

deal with. Thus the past is the most useful tool to accept

and justify change, to the point that innovation is legit-

imized if it is related to the sense of the past. The passage

ends with a definition of historicism, which is the extrap-

olation of past tendencies and their projection into the fu-

ture, said to be a great tool for foreseeing future changes. 

The text had to be shortened to be as long as the other

texts in the Exam. It can easily be noticed while reading

that a part of the essay has been omitted at the end of the

fourth paragraph. The logical development of ideas and

concepts might be difficult, and it may be more suitable

for those students who are very familiar with the read-

ing and interpretation of analytical and argumentative es-

says.

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