According to John Dewey, school is the key to understand democracy, conceived as the full realization of the person, a moral and dynamic realization that "must" extend to the entire community (Pezzano, 2014). Therefore, school must represent "the laboratory of democracy", that is to say a "way of life" towards which every person must naturally tend in their individuality and in their natural tendency to associate (Spadafora, 2018). In the current context emerges the need to reformulate traditional educational paradigms due to rapid changes and global challenges. With his emphasis on experiential learning and the social function of education, John Dewey provides a solid base to develop a fresh outlook for the school (Dewey, 1938). Similarly, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) in the field of education is a key tool to optimize learning paths (Luckin et al., 2016). The integration of John Dewey's visions with AI can give life to a sustainable educational model. This helps students not only to face the present challenges but also to design their own future. John Dewey emphasised the values of an education capable of fostering critical inquiry and active learning (Dewey, 1938). This vision finds increasing quality in the potential of AI as capacities of providing personalized learning based on competencies, which meets the individual needs of students (Zawacki-Richter et al., 2019). The use of AI in education has shown significant progress, from personalizing learning paths to assessing skills (Baker & Smith, 2014). However, the integration of AI raises ethical and practical issues, including the need for adequate infrastructure and policies for data protection (Holmes et al., 2019). An educational model that integrates AI to Deweyan principles requires an holistic approach treating students not only as learners but as active citizens (Selwyn, 2017). Project-based learning, supported by AI, can facilitate rich and engaging educational experiences, promoting collaboration, critical thinking, and the solution of real problems (Zhang et al., 2018). Adopting an educational model inspired by Dewey and enhanced by AI requires a renewal of teaching practices and educational policies. Educators must be trained on how to effectively use AI technologies, while institutions must ensure that such technologies are used ethically and inclusively. In terms of inclusion, AI is able of enhancing learning facilitation processes and better guiding individuals with disabilities to design their life choices (Fabiano, 2022). In conclusion, the integration of Dewey's educational visions with the capabilities of AI offers a unique opportunity to realize an education that is truly sustainable, equitable, and capable of preparing students for the challenges of the future. This requires active cooperations between all the proponents of these practices in order to ensure that technologies are employed in a way that increases the educational experience without replacing the fundamental human interaction for learning (Facer & Selwyn, 2021; Perla, 2023).

The proposal starts from Dewey's How Do We Think (Dewey, 2019), actualizing the role of active thinking as the development of critical thinking and free argumentation skills. We’ll also refer to Jaeger's analysis in Paideia (Jaeger, 1978) considering the development of democratic processes as linked to the freedom of participated debate. Development of critical thinking allows in rebalancing relationship between demonstrative and dialectical argumentation. If the individual is a social actor who joins the world through actions and speeches (Arendt, 2014), the creation of learning environments aimed at dialogue and co-construction of knowledge allows for the definition of skill development pathways parallel to computational thinking. Thinking as divergence system supports pluralism and democracy.

The risk posed by AI today is the imposition of a mathematical model that privileges cognitive processes as mathematical models, starting from an (erroneous) assumption that overburdens AI systems with confidence as an exact model. On the contrary, fostering the debate skills, critical and constructive thinking today allows to protect the democracy of the future by training politically and socially aware citizens with respect to an increasingly pervasive, autonomous, adaptive technology (AI) that can be adopted to make decisions in the political field. Rehabilitating the value of dialectics means revaluing pluralism as the free expression of opinions and the search for social and political solutions in the form of debate. This happens designing learning environment as Community of Enquiry. In fact, debate as a political and ethical tool for problem solving does not work according to tools of efficiency and perfection, but according to dialogical rules that privilege the encounter/clash between different positions and showing greater sensitivity to context starting from frame analysis.

Education in active thinking, dialogue and free debate curbs the danger of a tyranny of truth (Sadin, 2019). Educating for dialectics means fostering an approach to problem solving that:

a. Does not delegate responsibility to abstract entities;

b. Raises awareness of frame analysis and thus an understanding of the diversity of socio-political scenarios;

c. Enable democratic processes to be sent forward as a collective and debated search for principles and values that are not abstract but flexible and adaptable to different scenarios and situation.

Each era has been marked by educational challenges and developments (Simone, 2022); these challanges have brought to outline and legislate a potential inclusive model.

This paper aims to propose a new educational model that implements the Dewey method with digital tecnology and artificial intelligence (AI), introducing Media Education in the curricula hours of each school order, to learn a New Literacy.

The research project, adapting to the theoretical construct of Dewey in the digital and digitalized era, aims to highlight the actuality, applicability and a pedagogical value of Dewey’s Method. The method it’s workable in a complex society, dense with culture and interpenetrations of online and offline environments; Digital technology and AI can be useful tools, thanks to New Literacy, aid to strengthen an inclusive school model.

How is it possible to propose a model inclusive and democratic that it’s adapting to society and culture more of digital and artificial?

How could an Education Institution guide the students to access the digitalization world?

The school, according to the author, it’s a driving force to democracy, an environment and place where students can do expertise, through acting and doing (Learning by doing), internalizing the skills to be in society. Students are the future generation that needs a New Literacy, for reading, understanding and joining the digital society.

The most prevalent fear of AI is that it can replace humans, or teachers, and the major debite concerns ethics, if it is acceptable or not; the reflection, led by Selwyn points out that, actually, there are skills and tool that are of “central involvement of humans” (Selwyn, 2019).

Despite this, it is necessary to show interest in human skills or capabilities to learn how to dialog and cooperate with machines; consequently, all actors involved in school organigrams must learn a New Literacy (Rivoltella, 2020; 2023).

In addition, the use of AI at school would allow students to develop soft skills, and enhance their capabilities, then learning to universal New Literacy would lead to full participation in school and social life for all (active citizenship skills).

Through this examination, it is necessary making space and value in the school to AI, in consideration of the fact that the time in which we live is onlife (Floridi, 2022; Rivoltella, 2023) and that the algorithm of AI learn by evidence and errors, such as “Learning by doing”.

In conclusion, this paper is intended to propose an educational change in the structure of traditional school’s curricula; knowing how to converse and deal with machines, through New Literacy, represents a social progress opportunity that school should not give up. This research project sees teachers and students as protagonists in their own action and practice to learn by potential digital tools. AI can enrich the school by making it a new inclusive environment.

In the work How We Think (1910), Dewey places reflective thinking at the centre of his discussion, which is considered "the best way of thinking" and implemented when we faced with a problematic situation with no certain solution. As a result, the need arises to create new patterns of action, modifying or replacing previous ones. Reflective thinking enables the individual to question the logic behind the interpretation of everyday life experiences, that is, all those actions that are habitually performed following the interpretive canons given by past experiences. Therefore, enhancing the generative drive of thought through the development of critical and reflective thinking is one of the challenges of complexity culture. But how are the characters of reflexivity, freedom and self-awareness (Cambi, Pinto Minerva, 2023) combined with the assumptions of the onlife Era (Floridi, 2015), a new existence within which the real and virtual merge (and blur) and where the speed and instantaneousness of social networks do encourage instantaneous and unthoughtful reactions? Tech-age education calls for a post-human broadening of the field of experience. The very technology that has changed times, liquefying them, and dilated places, even defining them as non-places, can represent a crossroads of new reflexive intentionalities, and the peculiar conjunction of reflexivity and new technologies seems to be an opportunity for authentic educational design. There is a need, therefore, to find that Pirandellian lantern which allows one to illuminate experience and to sift through the fallout it has in the re elaboration of consciousness, as guarantee of the "right distance", wished by Silverstone (2007),which requires the world of education, to reconfigure itself as a promis of generativity, of identity construction and social inclusion also in the era of technics and technology (Bonaiuti et al., 2017). The encroachment thus initiated, mediated by the virtues of the digital (Rivoltella, 2015), builds bridges between the analog and the virtual, the old and the new, the human and the post-human, preserving the all-too-human and ethically set creative act of all cultural artifacts.

The analysis of added value has taken on an important role in the national debate, in relation to the need, expressed by numerous subjects, to innovate the evaluation models in use. In fact, the need to prepare complexity synthesis tools is emerging, in the awareness that the quality of results is the product of an organization's ability to extend effective evaluation methods from products and services to organizational structures. In the educational sector, the measurement of added value occurs through complex technical-statistical procedures, which take into consideration aggregations of students (class or school); a fundamental role is attributed to expectations in relation to performance, as well as to variables relating to factors extrinsic to the institution and educational action, i.e. "exogenous" variables, which influence the results achieved. To evaluate the effectiveness of a school it therefore becomes essential to define whether and to what extent it has succeeded in ensuring that its pupils have been able to learn more than what was achieved on average by 'comparable' pupils, in the same period of time, in other schools (Martini, 2020). We must also consider how the relationship between a student's performance and his previous performance is measured through a simple linear regression, which offers the possibility of establishing the influence of the effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable, measuring the intensity that this exercise. Quality control thus shifts from ascertaining the conformity of results to the exploratory verification of the conditions that ensure coherence and alignment of training interventions with the evaluation process and the achievement of standard objectives. In the scientific community the debate is therefore of importance, focused on the models to be adopted, but above all on their educational use, and the related fields of application (Capperucci, 2017), having to consider variables linked to measurement methods and tools. The objective of the value calculation will be configurable as an expression of: School Improvement: improvement of both student skills and school management; School Accountability: reporting on the work of schools and teachers; School Choice: the choice of institutions by students and their families through the rankings offered by the added value measure. In this essay we therefore intend to proceed with the examination of the calculation of added value, for the promotion of a democratic school capable of enhancing the personal journey of each student.

School is in the contemporary world the best laboratory to project a sustainable future, a place of a possible citizenship education. A space in which diversities, which must dialogue to build democracy, develop between traditions and opportunities linked to the technological innovation of AI, which can hide a possible change of the anthropocentric dimension.

In this paper the author will try to analyze the educational-legal change that is affecting Italian and European schools, with a particular focus on the protection of privacy as a fundamental principle of democracy.

A non-analog but digital citizenship, as defined by Law n.92/2019, should be better clarified due to the deep transformations of teaching, for the possible massive introduction in the near future of AI in the teaching/learning process. In particular, the author intends to focus on the specific educational-legal aspects of privacy and the ethical issues that emerge from the inappropriate use of AI by teachers and educators.

School governance in this way should be enriched by the added value of improving public ethics for the achievement of a new citizenship in an increasingly global and interconnected society, without forgetting the respect for the fundamental principles of our Italian Constitution and the inclusive perspective of Italian school.