Myths and Realities of Mass Secondary Schooling in Italy

Abstract

The last two decades have witnessed an unprecedented expansion in all educational sectors, to which that of secondary education has been no exception [i]. Enrolments in secondary schools more than doubled during the I960s, further increasing by about 50% in the I970s: as a result, the student population rose from 762,000 in 1960 to 2,386,00o in 1979 (see Table i). Although demographic trends, including the post-war 'baby boom' influenced this growth, especially in the first half of the I960s, most of the expansion was due to the continuously rising individual demand for longer education, clearly reflected in the enrolment rates which more than doubled between I959 and I975 (see Table II). Whereas in I959, only one fourteen-year-old in three was still at school, the corresponding proportion for I975 was three in four. And the relative increase was even larger for those aged I8, their enrolment rate rising from 12 to 36% over the same period. In less than twenty years, therefore, a situation in which only a minority of the teenage population continued secondary education after reaching the legal minimum school-leaving age [2] has given way to one in which the majority stay at school. In this article, I intend to examine the extent to which the enrolment rates are a good indicator of the extension of schooling. Admittedly, a glance at these rates suggests that there has been a transition from elite to mass secondary education, and that what was formerly the preserve of a minority is now experienced by the majority. Yet it seems pertinent to determine the extent to which this applies to all teenagers; to search for possible differences according to variables such as sex, social class and region: in short, to ascertain whether mass secondary schooling is really as homogeneous as the epithet 'mass' tends to imply. In order to answer these questions, one has to examine how far the expansion of the secondary sector has been paralleled by democratization or, in other words, by a reduction in ineqaulity in both access to, and participation in, education at this level [3]. Enrolment rates by age and sex are a first indicator of the process of democratization. According to the most recent data available (I975), sexual inequality, albeit reduced, is still substantial, with female enrolment rates five to nine points lower than those for boys of the same age (see Table III). This inequality is even more marked in a regional breakdown in which female enrolment rates in southern Italy are always the lowest (see Table IV), but in which also, somewhat surprisingly, rates for both sexes are much higher in central Italy than in the north. The main reason for this is probably the different labour market situation in the north where, with higher labour force participation rates and lower unemployment rates, teenagers have more employment opportunities than their counterparts elsewhere. At the same time, family income in central Italy is high enough to allow many to use school as a 'parking area', a far less likely tactic in the south. As a whole,