Educating Citizens: International Perspectives on Civic Values and School Choice

Chapter 10. Italy: The Impossible Choice

Questions about the public regulation of nonpublic schools and the role that such regulation should play in U.S. education policy cannot be immediately and obviously answered by examining Italy’s experience, for two basic reasons. First of all, school choice was not considered an educational issue in Italy until the 1990s. Because there has not been much public debate on the topic, none of the various government administrations, whether leftor right-oriented, have ever developed a real strategy to promote school choice. Rather, the political debate has focused on the role of private institutions in the development of public values. Second, Italy’s history is extremely peculiar, and it differs in particular from that of the United States. It would therefore be ill-advised to study local Italian processes with the idea that easily transferable lessons could be learned. At the moment, public opinion in Italy regarding private schools is changing . In my view, this is no small thing. A real cultural turning point is approaching, and political decisions in the near future could either support cultural openness toward school choice or doom it. This chapter begins with a description of the history of the Italian school system, considering in particular the position of nonstate private education as opposed to state-supported public education. It is important to make clear at the outset the peculiar terminology regarding the status of schools in Italy. Until recently, only schools run by the Italian nation-state were identified as 268 Italy: The Impossible Choice luisa ribolzi 10 10 9516-5 ch10.qxd 8/25/2004 9:39 AM Page 268 italy: the impossible choice 269 public schools. Even schools run by municipal public authorities were considered private, as were schools run by religious or other private organizations. The Italian School as a Device to Promote National Unity In order to understand how school choice evolved in Italy, it is necessary first to recognize that the question of family choice of schools has nationwide ideological associations. The majority of Italians assume that the term pertains specifically to Catholic schools, and a distinction between them and private schools in general has emerged only recently. To this day, religious nonCatholic schools are scarce in Italy, and for the most part the schools that do exist are Jewish. But despite the long and continued presence of the Catholic Church in Italy, the Italian school system developed as a strictly secular institution. Schools played a strong role in the political construction of the Italian nation. However, Catholic authorities did not participate in that process, because it involved the conquest of Rome and the confinement of the Pope to Vatican City. For this reason, public schools were equivalent to state schools in Italy, and Catholic schools were not considered part of the national school system but as segregating institutions, at odds with the very idea of Italian citizenship. The state has therefore focused primarily on controlling Catholic schools rather than on helping society to become more engaged in education. This attitude, though prevalent, is not formally recognized by law, and the present debate is based on different interpretations of the Italian constitution . In fact, article 33 of the postwar constitution, adopted in 1947, states that “public and private bodies shall be entitled to establish schools and educational institutions, with no financial costs for the State.” That phrase sparked a seemingly endless series of political confrontations: supporters of school choice insist that it simply means that the state is not obliged to provide funding but could choose to do so. They also understand the provision to mean that the government should not allocate any funds to start a private school but could fund its operations. Opponents of school choice maintain that the phrase implies an absolute prohibition against state support for private schools. Of course, had this been the real issue, the problem could have been solved fifty years ago by revising the Constitution. In reality, the centralized and monopolistic educational system in Italy rejects the notion that the right to educate children belongs primarily to parents and family, with schools in a subsidiary role. Until recently, the predominant ideological influences have 10 9516-5 ch10.qxd 8/25/2004 9:39 AM Page 269 270 luisa ribolzi not allowed the debate to concern family school choice. Public discussion has been confined to defining the distinction between public and private, wherein public refers exclusively to state schools...