School in contemporary Italy: structural features and current policies

This chapter describes and discusses the Italian school system and current school policies from the point of view of the welfare state. A number of reasons support this point of view. First is a historical one: research in historical sociology has, indeed, shown that in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, the creation of mass school systems has been one of the major steps, if notthemajor step, of the process of state-building (Ramirez and Boli, 1987). School policies have somehow been the first welfare policies, paving the way for successive interventions of the state in society, such as the creation...