The school in the 70s between history and historiography. From “molecular reforms” to the birth of a “new educational culture”

The contribution traces the school policy of the 1970s, with a particular focus on the measures that made that phase an “irreversible caesura” in the history of Italian school. On the one hand, reference is made to the legislative measures that represent a significant response of the political system to the new needs of school and society posed by the student and youth protests of 1968. On the other, divergent historiographical interpretations are compared: the critical gaze of those who have been able to grasp only the negative elements (“destructive reformism”), and the analysis of those who, without concealing limitations and shadows, valued that decade as a “fruitful period”, not least for the resilience of the democratic framework. The “micro-reforms” innervated a “molecular reformism” that helped renew school and educational culture: less reactionary and classist, more emancipatory and inclusive.