For the fifth consecutive year, the 'Rummo' Scientific High School in Benevento opened its doors to officers from across the State Police, hosting a full day of workshops, demonstrations, and seminars designed to bring students face-to-face with the realities of law enforcement, civic responsibility, and digital safety. The event, titled A Scuola di polizia - Education for Legality and Familiarization with the Police, drew participation from students in the third, fourth, and fifth years of the school. What distinguished this edition was not merely the breadth of topics covered, but the depth of direct engagement between young people and the institutions that serve them.
Institutions Meet the Classroom
The morning opened with remarks from Giovanni Leuci, Chief of Police for Benevento, who framed the initiative not as a public relations exercise but as a structural investment in the relationship between state institutions and the next generation of citizens. School principal Annamaria Morante, described by organizers as a consistent advocate for civic education within the institute, has made legality and prevention recurring pillars of the school's educational programme. Her involvement reflects a broader shift in Italian secondary education, where themes such as rule of law, institutional trust, and personal responsibility are increasingly embedded into extracurricular and co-curricular activities - not left to chance encounters with civics textbooks.
The collaboration between a scientific high school and law enforcement may appear unlikely at first glance, but it speaks to a well-established European model of civic familiarization, where demystifying the work of public institutions reduces both fear and distrust among young people. When students see officers not as abstract figures of authority but as professionals with specific, learnable skills, the psychological distance between citizen and state narrows.
Digital Danger Takes Centre Stage
Among the day's sessions, the contribution of the Postal Police drew considerable attention. Their presentation addressed the landscape of online risk that students encounter daily - cyberbullying, digital scams, the exploitation of social networks, and the erosion of personal privacy. These are not abstract threats. Adolescents represent one of the most active demographics online, and their exposure to manipulative content, data harvesting, and peer-driven harassment is well documented across European and international research contexts.
The Postal Police's focus on the responsible use of social platforms and the protection of digital privacy carries particular weight at a moment when Italy, like much of the European Union, is grappling with enforcement of data protection frameworks and the practical realities of platform accountability. For students who have grown up with smartphones and social media as ambient features of life, the session offered something genuinely useful: a framework for thinking about their own digital behaviour and its consequences, delivered not by a parent or teacher, but by officers whose professional work involves confronting those consequences directly.
Forensic Science and Canine Units Bring Operational Reality Into School
Two other elements of the day stood out for their pedagogical creativity. The Forensic Police unit recreated a simulated crime scene within the school itself, walking students through the investigative methods and evidence-collection techniques used in real operations. This kind of experiential learning carries an advantage that classroom instruction rarely achieves: it makes abstract procedural knowledge concrete and spatially immediate. Students were not told how forensic work is done - they watched it unfold in a familiar environment.
The State Police canine unit provided operational demonstrations involving drug- and explosives-detection dogs, generating visible enthusiasm among students. Beyond the spectacle, the demonstration served an educational function - illustrating the diversity of tools and methods law enforcement draws upon, and the level of training required to maintain them. Both activities reinforced a central message of the event: that public security is not a passive condition but the product of sustained, skilled professional effort.
Legality as Civic Education, Not Just Compliance
What gives an initiative like this its longer-term value is the distinction it draws between obedience and understanding. Teaching young people to follow rules because they are told to produces fragile civic behaviour. Teaching them to understand why those rules exist - and to see the human and institutional effort that upholds them - builds something more durable. The inclusion of sessions on drug use among adolescents and road safety alongside digital privacy and forensic science reflects a genuinely holistic approach: legality is not a single subject but a disposition toward public life.
The fifth edition of this event at the Rummo school also functions as orientation - offering students a direct, honest look at the breadth of careers within the State Police, from digital crime specialists to forensic analysts to canine handlers. In a country where public sector careers remain significant destinations for young graduates, that exposure has practical as well as civic value. The event has evidently found its audience: student engagement across all three year groups was, by all accounts, genuine rather than obligatory - a distinction that matters when the goal is lasting civic awareness rather than a single afternoon's impression.
