School autonomy before autonomy. The R.p.d. 419/74 and the ordering and structure high school experiments between the Seventies and Eighties

Decree 419/74, which regulated school experimentation, is perhaps the least known of the delegated decrees on schools. Yet, for twenty years it was the only measure with which to try to renew high school in the absence of a reform, until the advent of school autonomy. The decree reflected the international debate on the comprehensive school and the regionalization process then underway in Italy, but also the need for the Ministry of public education and its administrative apparatus to govern a “periphery” in disorder. It therefore represents a governance tool with which teachers, local and regional agencies and the ministry itself have attempted to find a new balance in the relationship between school and territory. The protagonists of this sort of ante litteram school autonomy were the “minisperimentazioni” and “maxisperimentazioni” launched through article 3 of the decree. Heirs of the “bienni unitari” of the Seventies, they tried to change the school structure to try to respond to the social transformations of the country first during the Seventies, and then in the Eighties, at a time marked by the progressive loss of the centrality of the school in the within an increasingly broad and crowded formal and informal educational landscape.