Old and New Markets in Education: Austerity, Standards and ICT as Pushes towards Privatisation(s) in Italy

Abstract

This article deals with the issue of privatisation(s) in the field of education. In doing so, it focuses on three distinct, although interrelated, processes currently being experienced in the Italian education system: (a) the widening of the spaces for private schooling; (b) the ongoing privatisation of policy and the related blurring of the boundaries between public policy-making and the private sector; and (c) the dynamics of new/old markets where commercial actors and edu-businesses sell tools, technologies, knowledge and data, policy programs and recipes that inform educational processes. The work tries to highlight some connections between specific developments in these three processes of privatisation(s) and three distinct policy trends that are increasingly shaping the European education space, namely austerity, standardisation, and digitalisation. The conclusion discusses the actual and potential implications of all of this for both the ongoing transformation of the role of the education state in the post-welfarist scenario, and the restructuring of the societal governing of education, reflecting on the relationship between these specific processes of privatisation(s), the related reshaping of the role of the education state, that seems to shift towards a metagovernance function, and the developing of a new market-like governmental environment informed by the neo-liberal imaginary.