Introduction: school and the welfare state

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 not the major 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 of pension systems, public health care and so on. The argument also holds from the point of view of individual attitudes and values: as socialisation is one of the three core functions of modern school systems (Brint, 2006), schools have a major role in socialising individuals to welfare state-related attitudes and values, such as solidarity and universalism.

A second reason is an economic one, relating to the second key function of school systems, that is, the transmission of knowledge and skills. If the welfare state is conceptualised as the intervention of the state in social and economic activities with the function of increasing the well-being of the population, education can be defined as its core building block. In terms of the ‘social investment approach’ (Morel et al, 2012), the school system makes individuals more skilled and productive, thus favouring their capacity to remain in the labour market, economic growth and the well-being of society. It is only the increase of productivity on the part of educated workers that enables a society to invest a quota of its income in supporting those who cannot work, such as the young, the sick, the elderly or the permanently unable. Moreover, after the Second World War, the expansion of the welfare state as an employer has stimulated the expansion of school participation, with its demand for qualified and semi-qualified personnel to staff health care, public transport, social assistance and the school system itself (Collins, 2000).

A third reason relates to the egalitarian aims that are at the heart of many welfare policies. If one is interested in the redistributive action of the welfare state as a means to produce equality of opportunity among individuals, then the school system is the first instance of such redistribution.