Community educational pacts in Italy: an interpretation of UNESCO’s new social contract for education?

ABSTRACT

The idea of a new social contract for education, as outlined in the UNESCO (2021) report on the Futures of Education, refers to the many instances of cooperation among communities and education systems around the world. In Italy, these experiences, commonly referred to as Community Educational Pacts, have gained increasing attention in recent years and have been seen as a potential response to the challenges affecting the Italian education system. This paper examines the theoretical underpinnings of the principle of education as a common good as the political framing for the new social contract for education. It then reviews the experience of school/community alliances in Italy, based on preliminary studies carried out by the National Institute for Documentation, Innovation and Educational Research and the Forum on Inequality and Diversity. The paper ultimately discusses the extent to which these experiences can represent concrete opportunities for reimagining education and the school system grounded on the concept of education as a common good, thus providing a possible interpretation of the ‘new social contract for education’.

KEYWORDS:

• Common goods
• community educational pacts
• democratic education
• new social contract
• UNESCO

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The traditional approach to education, defined as a public good, establishes the primary responsibility of the state in the provision, financing, monitoring and regulation of educational opportunities, as also envisaged in the education-related goal of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN 2015).

2. The term ‘goods’ is understood in the broadest possible sense, as a whole set of tools, activities, values, rights and processes that would benefit everyone.

3. Considering a different taxonomy of goods and services elaborated through the juxtaposition of economic and legal frameworks, it is possible to identify a category of common goods which includes, but is not limited to, the commons. This classification is not based on the objective material characteristics of a determined good but on the value that good is supposed to supply to a determined community (destination) (Fidone 2017). Rather than considering the abstract property of (non)excludability, which is typically a natural category, this categorization focuses on the effective exclusion or non-exclusion, which is made on the basis of a political or legislative decision. In this perspective, common goods are those non-exclusive goods, like public goods, which are particularly intended to fulfil the benefit of a specific community.

4. Italian 2001 Constitutional reform introduced the principles of subsidiarity, adequacy and differentiation; Italian School Autonomy Reform (Law n. 59/97); Buona Scuola (Law n. 107/2015).

5. Achievement results in the last available National Assessment Tests (INVALSI) show that territorial gaps are widening, as confirmed by the 2018 OECD-PISA results which also indicate that the performance of Italian students is worsening, and is lower than the OECD average (INVALSI 2023; OECD 2019). Moreover, Italy is among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries that spends the least on education, both with respect to GDP (less than 4 per cent compared to the average of OECD countries, which is around 5 per cent), and with respect to total public spending (7.4 per cent compared to a European average of 10.6 per cent) (OECD 2022).

6. INDIRE is the Italian Ministry of Education’s oldest research organisation. https://www.indire.it/en/home/about-us/

7. The Forum on Inequality and Diversity is an alliance of active citizens’ organizations and researchers aimed at producing and disseminating research, policy proposals and ‘methods for decision making’ which can enhance social and environmental justice. https://www.forumdisuguaglianzediversita.org/our-project/

8. National Observatory on Community Educational Pacts: https://piccolescuole.indire.it/iniziative/osservatorio-patti-educativi-territoriali/

9. Piccole Scuole INDIRE: https://piccolescuole.indire.it/

10. If we consider that this figure refers only to half of the twenty Italian regions for which data were collected, it is realistic to imagine that almost 15% of Italian school institutes have signed up a Community Educational Pact over the last two years.

11. Futura. La Scuola per l’Italia di domani [Futura – The School for the Italy of tomorrow]: https://pnrr.istruzione.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/PNRR_EN.pdf

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rita Locatelli

Rita Locatelli is Research Fellow at the Department of Education of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan (Italy), where she collaborates with the UNESCO Chair “Education for Human Development and Solidarity among Peoples”.