Abstract

Premise: aims and contexts of this special issue This special issue of the Italian Journal of Sociology of Education deals with 'Education paths, social inequalities and life trajectories'. When this special issue was first conceived, our purpose was to bring together scientists from different social sciences to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of how characteristics of educational systems (primary, secondary and tertiary education) are related to various sorts of social inequalities, promoting the sharing of theoretical and empirical reflections. Thus, the aim was to deal with one of the most central issues in sociology, i.e. inequality, which acquires a great importance in sociology of education, inviting authors to submit manuscripts presenting theoretically engaged studies that explore and address such issues in conceptual and/or empirical ways, assuming either a local, national, European or international perspective. The largely debated question is about whether the educational system can effectively overcome social inequalities, or just merely reflect or even intensify them. In order to deal with such a question it is necessary to recognize the multidimensional nature of contemporary inequality, as the focus of debates on inequality has become ever more complex over time, involving more of the traditional dimensions regarding inequality, such as class, race, gender and disability. Doubtless, inequality in education is a key question for social theorists, sociologists, policy makers and practitioners committed to equitable distributions of educational and other social goods and to education development as a moral, social and political goal. Indeed, education and equity have been posited as key themes for the future, as confirmed by the Europe 2020 Strategy shifting Europe toward a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy. This requires a careful attention on the role of education in the present society: indeed, different possible roles attributed to education could lead to very different interpretations of inequality and its significance. Recently Mr. Renzi's government proposed a school reform that actually is under discussion in Parliament and that met the opposition of Unions of Teachers, preoccupied for the reinforced role of school principals and for the introduction of evaluation. The reform has stimulated only partly a debate on the main goals of the school, which has instead occurred following the introduction of the national system of evaluation 1 . It doesn't matter to summarize here the relevant debate that is taking place in Italy, frequently ideologically oriented. We can recall just two main observations. First of all, every educational system must warrantee three different goals, which haven't an optimal mix, because they depend on the context. The first is obviously to ensure equal opportunity to all, for combined reasons of social justice and optimization of social functioning: the principle is sometimes defined 'meritocracy', but luckily Elise Tenret (2011) and Carlo Barone (2012) learned well the lesson of Michael Young (1958) and showed the ideological bias of this term. Nevertheless, a real debate on this topic can lead us to recognize the necessity of 'positive actions' to ensure real equality of opportunity. As a previous Vice Minister of Education recently said, we must enrich the principle of equal opportunity, 'giving more to people that start with less' Finally, there is a third goal to which also European Educational policies urge us: citizenship competencies must be warranted to everyone, regardless of his/her starting point, personal goals and conditions. The European Parliament and the European Council on the 18 th of December 2006 approved a recommendation on key competences for lifelong learning, specifying their necessity for personal fulfillment, active citizenship, social cohesion and employability in a knowledge society. An additional goal is an equalitarian one, which considers not the equality of starting points (the first one), nor the differentiation of the arrival points (the second one), but the equality of the arrival points without considering the points of departure. Faced with these three main goals of the contemporary educational systems, scholars focused their attention on mainly one of these. One of the most interesting approaches tries to combine structural and individualistic perspectives. Analyzing the level of meritocracy perceived by Italian students, Elise Tenret (2014) finds that ¾ of the sample thinks that the educational system is meritocratic, also if this perception isn't related to the perception of the utility of the educational qualifications in the labor market. In fact, a lot of empirical evidence shows that in Italy the access to the labor market is related to social origins both directly and by means of school attainment and in a period of economic crisis and lower mobility the over qualification of young people strengthens the combined effects of social and cultural capital. Also for this reason we see that young people (and their families) embed the 'structural' constraints (and their consequences in terms of hierarchy of schools, segregation of educational paths and so on in their strategic action, Devleeshouwer, 2015) and live their educational destiny as the result of individual (or familiar) choices, not as the fruit of structural conditioning (see also Inequality and education: some reflections on contemporary society After the launching of our special issue, the Italian and European scientific debates on such topics have been enriched by the publication of important contributions, confirming how the topics related to inequality and education constitute even nowadays a very fertile land for theoretical and empirical studies. Among others, we can recall three important special issues: Scuola Democratica (2014), Quaderni di Sociologia (2014) and the special issue of the Oxford Review of Education to mark its 40th anniversary We think that this renewed interest towards the relationship between social inequalities and school systems is due to the convergence of at least three distinct but related topics in the political and scientific debate. First of all, we can quote a renewed interest in social mobility. In Italy for a long time this topic has been cultivated in the inner circle of experts but, after the crisis of the last years, people have felt that in a declining economy the phenomenon of social immobility and the polarization of social stratification (with the great crisis of middle classes -see Briefly, both the Bourdieu perspective Also studies that use a transition approach (see This leads to the crucial question: Can Education Change Society?, to quote the title of a recent book of Michael Apple (2013). His answer is honest: 'it depends on a lot of hard and continued efforts by many people' (p. 2). One of the qualities of this book is to underline that school has been considered relevant to change society not only from the left, but also from conservatives, and the attacks that he describes (referring to other countries) 'on teachers and all public employees, on unions, on schools and on the curricula …', remind us that some people sometimes give to the school an importance as an institution crucial for the democratization of the society greater than social reformers. In the Italian case, authoritative voices (see: Bottani, 2013) highlight the difficulties faced by the school in carrying out the tasks that are assigned by a complex society, in which the needs of competitiveness coexist with the need for greater social equity. And for a long time no public debate on the main task of the school in a democratic society took place; on the contrary, a strongly ideological debate arose around the creation of a National Evaluation System and particularly on the role played in this system by INVALSI's test and data (see the article of Argentin and Triventi in this special issue). The Italian educational system is not very healthy; in 2013, 17% of young people aged 18-24 years were early school leavers (20.2% boys and 13.7% girls), without having obtained a qualification recognized in the labor market. There were about two and a half million (26% of the total) young people between 15 and 29 in 2013 who were before Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET), a phenomenon that concerns all countries of Europe but that in Italy is much more serious: only Greece has a higher incidence, while Germany and France registered NEET's ratios as much smaller. In addition, the data from the international survey PISA (Programme of International Student Assessment) show that Italy is below many European countries (OECD-PISA 2012 dataset referring to the Italian sample is used by Brunella Fiore in her essay). And the countries that have the highest unemployment rate in the range 25-34 years are the same where there is a higher percentage of people with low education; likewise, the countries with the highest unemployment rate in the group aged 25-29 are the same with the worst results in PISA 2009 and 2012. On the other hand, in Italy only 22.4% of the age group 30-34 hold a university degree or similar. The increase of 6.8 points between 2004 and 2013 is not adequate to reach the target of 40% set by the European Strategy for 2020. Also for these reasons Mr. Renzi Italian Government proposed the previously mentioned school reform. Approaching the theme from different observation lenses In replying to our call for papers, we have received 21 abstracts: a quite explanatory result of the great interest in the topic by the scientific community. At the same time, however, a hard selection has been required: after selecting 12 abstracts among those proposed, the papers have been submitted to a double refereeing process (a blind review from a qualified expert and the guest editors' comments). At the end of such process, the special issue contains nine articles (in addition to this introductory article) written by 16 authors from different countries and differing backgrounds. The papers composing the present special issue approach several of the aspects involved in analysing the dimensions of educational paths, social inequalities and life trajectories. The range of the sub-topic that we are dealing with appears wide and rich: inequalities in education related to social and economic conditions, gender, ethnicity/migration background; education/school-to-work transitions; over-education and over-skilling issues; social inequalities and educational success measured by grades and test scores (PISA and INVALSI); educational attainment, occupational career and inequalities over the life-course; early school leavers. From a methodological point of view, almost all the essays report meaningful results generated from fieldwork and are carried out with a variety of research methods and conceptual toolkits, both quantitative and qualitative. Most of the article focuses on the Italian national context; three essays show the current situation of educational contexts in two other European countries (Germany and Switzerland). We think the collected essays provide a very interesting overview on the aforesaid themes. Taken together, though they were surely not meant to make up a systematic approach to the subject matter, we hope they offer very important ways to explore, through the various theoretical, methodological, professional and cultural perspectives, several of the issues on the debates about the causes and consequences of educational inequality and how it might successfully be addressed. At the same time, we hope the reader will be stimulated to identify new research questions, leading to develop future lines of inquiry as well as to deal with theoretical and methodological challenges in order to better explore the proposed issue concerning the social inequalities and their link with education.