ABSTRACT
The history of the school and teacher education in Italy after World War II can be summed up as three phases of change. The first period happened during the 1960s and 1970s, within an ample societal discontinuity affecting all institutions: family and school, church and state, prison and mental hospitals. In this ‘reformist period’, there were many new laws regarding schools, teachers, pupils and parents, arising from very different secular and catholic points of view. Phase two starts at the beginning of the 1990s when a crisis in public administration caused a decline in great educational themes, and instead organisational solutions were sought to address problems within the school system. Phase three from the 1990s until today was characterised by neo-liberal topics and arguments. The political slogan was ‘a new school with English, business and IT’. Only during the first phase, we can find a public discussion about the role and the specific competencies of the teacher. However, if we listen to the voices of teachers and trainee teachers in the period from the 1990s, it is possible to discover a similarly vibrant and rich debate about trainee teachers’ personal moral and political values. This chapter intends to combine these two different histories: on the one hand, the history based on the national laws and regulations and, on the other hand, a different history, from below, from the voices of teachers and their educators.
