Deconstructing Sketches of the European Education Space. European Social Fund, Neo-liberalism and the Modernizing of Italian Education

This paper offers a contribution to the analysis of the ongoing construction of a European space of education policy. In particular the work addresses the case of recent trends in education policy in four southern Italian regions that are part of the Convergence Objective. In these contexts, the European Social Fund (ESF) has become in recent years the main source of funding to promote innovation in the field of education. In the last decade, the Italian Ministry of Education has used these funds to launch pilot initiatives in the field of evaluation, special projects to tackle educational inequalities and policies to innovate organization, didactics and pedagogies and enrich educational provision. Many of these initiatives are considered as pilot experience to be extended at the national level to modernize Italian schooling and to match the requirements of international institution such as the EU and the OECD. Despite the official rhetoric that enlists the ‘socially just’ purposes of these policies, this flow of money has opened up a field of struggle where conflicting discourses confront each other and possibilities for thinking and acting about education are disclosed and/or inhibited. Using the studies in governmentality and the analytics of government as sensitizing interpretative framework, we analyse this contested policy trajectory as a field of struggles looking at: a) the ongoing construction of new regimes of truth on the purposes, means and functioning of education and their clashes with the welfarist legacies; b) the establishment of new technologies as obligatory passage points in the daily functioning of education; c) the enactment of new processes of subjectivation that imply the redesign of the key subjects of education (i.e. teachers, head teachers, students, relevant stakeholders); d) the diverse processes and relations by which these discourses, technologies and subjectivities are assembled into relatively stable forms of organization and institutional practice. The arguments developed in this paper draw on a two-step, two-year long qualitative research activity, combining policy texts analysis with ‘in-depth’ interviews of key informants. We used a spiral-like research design, moving backwards and forwards from documentary to interview analysis in order to construct and refine gradually the research questions. Thus, the paper draws on different data sources. First, we have collected policy texts and documents (government reports; ministerial speeches and press articles; policy advisors’ speeches and presentations). Second, the insights gained have been supplemented by some in-depth interviews carried out with an ‘opportunistic sample’ of key informants and policy actors such as politicians, bureaucrats, unionists, non-educational actors intervening in the field and professionals. The interviews worked as confirmatory sources for the research findings. Data have been analysed using the spiral-like methodology of Grounded Theory. First, policy texts and interviews have been coded through the creation of descriptive categories (open coding). Second, the establishment of connections between descriptive categories has led us towards the definition of interpretative categories (axial coding) and the identification of core categories (selective coding). The core categories that emerged through this methodology are used as key concepts around which the sections of the paper are organized. The paper shows how the policy space opened by the flow of funding of the ESF has functioned as a ‘Laboratory of Modernization’ for the Italian education system where: a) the purposes of education, its problems and solutions are thought and imagined within new fields of validity, normativity and actuality that are inspired by the discourses of competitiveness, knowledge economy and performativity and challenge the welfarist principles of education; b) new technologies of calculation and accountability based on objective data become obligatory passage points in the daily functioning of education, whereas some core pillars of the three system-messages of welfarist education are re-designed according to neo-liberal assumptions; c) the key subjects of welfarist education (i.e. teachers, head teachers, students) are subjectivated respectively as competitive performers, technicians, entrepreneurs and human capital. Of course, this is not an uncontested and peaceful change. On the contrary, a messy scenario emerges where these policy processes encounter strong resistance and open paradoxical spaces for alternative discourses and practices.