ABSTRACT
Last year, nearly 100,000 Italians went back to school to take their middle school diploma. The curriculum is apparently the same as for the diploma their children sit for at 14 or 15. In fact, the approach, contents and underlying aims of the adult course are quite different. Apparently more open than the British system, the Italian schools are among the world’s most selective and class biased. A rigid hierarchy of educational opportunity consigns the children of poor, peasant, dialect-speaking parents to almost instant failure. In 1946, the communist partisans in the cities and factories laid down their arms. For the next twenty years, the trade unions and the workers’ parties guaranteed industrial peace for the sake of national reconstruction. But several years before adult students began researching the facts of discrimination in the schools, a group of school children had assembled their own devastating critique of selection.
