Hybridising Education: Italy’s Third Way To Exit From Welfarism

The paper deals with the detailed description of the Italian educational policy-making post Second World War and draws some interpretative traces concerning the two-way connection between the hegemonic governance settlements and the discursive frames influencing the education policy-making and its change. Adopting the interpretative tools of the critical policy historiography and the critical discourse approaches, the work interprets the recent trajectory of the Italian education system identifying two different political eras, namely the era of the welfarist education state and the (re)building of the nation and the era of the restructuring of education, between managerialism, decentralisation and a tentative neoliberalism. Through the analysis of policy texts, literature and previous researches, the article sketches the education debate in Italy during the last sixty-five years, its dynamics, controversies and contradictions, and the shifting of the organisational and governance settlements. After the welfarist era, where the alliance between the bureaucratic and professional discourses dominated the Italian educational landscape, straddling the new millennium, some hints of the entering of a neoliberal discourse are recognisable. The Italian system could be described as messy and still evolving and the war of discourses witnesses educational governance settlements still hybridising and confronting each other.