LA SOCIOLOGIA DELL’EDUCAZIONE IN ITALIA: PROSPETTIVE DI RICERCA DI FRONTE ALLA “RIFORMABILITÀ” DEI SISTEMI EDUCATIVI

In Italy, as in many other contemporary capitalist societies, the school system is under pressure. This fact is due to institutional reforms - mainly to accountability mechanisms introduced in a “new public management” perspective - but it is also a consequence of main changes occurred in society. Several research topics connected to those changes emerged in the last decade and shaped sociological research in Italy. Moreover, it seems plausible that they will shape even future research in education. In our chapter, we describe those themes and the main findings established by previous research: • the relevance assumed by the notion of competence lead to realize that a key role in education is played by several social institutions formally and explicitly not devoted to education aims (i.e. firm); at the same time, it became evident that non cognitive skills are crucial and should be developed also within schools. This fact reinforces a vision where schools are institutions devoted to socialize and not only instruct students. As a consequence, educating to values and norms is a topic re-assuming relevance in sociological research; • the other side of this story is that, nowadays, several education agencies contribute to the same task, but they are not connected and integrated and several tensions could arise (i.e. integrating the Web in formal education is still an issue in Italian schools). Schools, universities and firms are not adequately connected and the economic crisis worsened two Italian long term problems - youth unemployment and early leavers – leading to an extremely high rate of NEETs (not in employment and not in education) among recent cohorts; • at the same time, even schools are more complex organizations than in the past. Schools autonomization led to heterogeneous interactions among teachers, school leaders, parents and students and sociological research is paying more and more attention to decision making processes in schools; • not surprisingly, we detect a renewed attention to research focused on teachers. Educational economists introduced the concept of teacher effectiveness and developed a conspicuous amount of evidence on this topic. At the same time, among Italian sociologists, teachers are considered more than in the past as an occupational group displaying peculiar conditions, needs and reflexivity; • also the other side of school classes, namely students, is investigated by sociological research more than in the past. On one side, we observe that the category of youth became a stabilized framework to interpret students’ behaviors and attitudes; on the other side, students population is becoming more heterogeneous than in the past; • even a traditional sociological topic, social stratification and the role played by education in its reproduction, is evolving. Less attention is paid to quantifying inequality persistence and more effort is invested to investigate the relevance of horizontal stratification (school tracking and university fields of study) and differences in quality (among institutions and curricula). Moreover other forms of inequality are assuming higher relevance: gender, multicultural backgrounds, religions and secularism. Some other themes emerged recently in Italian sociological research, but it seems plausible that they will be central in the future debate, as it happened in other countries: • the consequences of students with migratory background in schools and how this phenomenon will be faced by teachers and schools; • more generally, we detect that more differentiated students special needs are emerging, forcing more in the past teachers to personalize education; • the increasing relevance in education of Technology of Information and Communication (TIC) and the digital skills required to take advantage from them; • the role played by technologies, spaces setting and ecology in shaping education; • the possibilit