The Neoliberal Mutation of the Italian Education System from the 2000s to the threshold of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan

Abstract

We shed light on the policies implemented in Italian school and University as part of the “National Recovery and Resilience Plan”, i.e., the reforms adopted by the Italian government and financed by European funds to tackle the pandemic crisis. These measures appear fully consistent with the educational policies of the last two decades. We argue that Italian policy has taken advantage of yet another crisis to accelerate reform processes, overcoming political and cultural resistances to the supposedly modernising neo-liberal agenda been pursued since the beginning of the 2000s. The seeming PNRR's educational turn can be considered a form of “gattopardismo”, i.e. a strategy that follows the principle enunciated by one of the characters of The Leopard, the famous novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, according to which “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”.