At RomeCup 2026, Paolo Dario defends the value of the Italian school system
“Our school system, our education system, continues to be perhaps the best in the world.” With these words, Paolo Dario, professor emeritus at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa and founder of the Institute of BioRobotics, opened his speech at RomeCup 2026, during the inaugural session dedicated to high-tech companies that create jobs and new opportunities for young people.
A clear statement, deliberately going against the grain of many narratives about the Italian school system, which is often described solely in terms of its weaknesses. For Dario, however, the value of the national education system is measured by the “end product”: pupils, students, graduates, PhD holders and young researchers who, even abroad, are recognised for the quality of their training.
The strength, he explained, lies in a broad and interdisciplinary basic education, which does not separate scientific and technical knowledge from the humanities, history, geography, psychology and social sciences. An education that helps to make sense of the complexity of the contemporary world and which, particularly in the age of artificial intelligence and robotics, becomes even more valuable.
“To understand a complex world like ours, you need a holistic, overarching view,” Dario pointed out. It is not enough to know about machines: you need to understand how people are made, how they think, and the cultures, traditions, conflicts and contexts in which technologies are developed and used.
This, according to Dario, is the wealth that the Italian school system imparts to young people: a solid grounding, capable of integrating diverse knowledge and developing critical thinking. A resource of which young people must become more aware. Not least because, he emphasised, this very quality is highly valued abroad: “They take our best students away, but not just the best. The ordinary ones too. You don’t need to be a school superhero to succeed. All it takes is a good grounding, the kind our schools provide.”
This gives rise to the most urgent challenge: to make the most of this heritage for the benefit of young people and the country. For Dario, it is not just a matter of retaining talent, but of creating the conditions for them to express themselves, build businesses, generate innovation and contribute to Italy’s economic and social development. The creation of start-ups and spin-offs, once almost unthinkable within the university world, is now a recognised and necessary path for transforming scientific, technological, humanistic and social knowledge into new opportunities.
In his speech, Dario then referred to Dante and Canto XXVI of Inferno, recalling Ulysses’s verse: “You were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge”. Two words, virtue and knowledge, which for the professor remain decisive even today, “even more so than 700 years ago”.
Knowledge, he explained, means not being content to use tools and platforms without knowing what they contain, how they work, where the data ends up, or who benefits from the technologies we use. Virtue, on the other hand, refers to the realm of principles, values and responsibility. Because robots and artificial intelligence “do not come from Mars”: they are built by human beings, and for this very reason human beings must be their conscious protagonists.
The message addressed to the young people at RomeCup is therefore a call to ambition and responsibility: not merely to seek opportunities elsewhere, but to ask oneself what contribution each person can make to those who come after. “It is not clear why one should not be a key player in Rome but can be one in San Francisco,” said Dario, highlighting the need to build an ecosystem around talent that is capable of recognising, supporting and nurturing it.
In the age of artificial intelligence, robotics and autonomous systems, the value of the Italian education system lies in equipping young people with the tools to engage with the future: technical knowledge, a humanities-based education, critical thinking, principles and responsibility. For Dario, this is the foundation from which to start, not merely to endure innovation, but to shape it.
