The Italian debate about the role of teacher within teacher education, a long dialectic between two opposing conceptions: educational intellectual or cultural employee

The history of the school and teacher education in Italy after the II World War can be summed up as three phases of change. Setting aside the experience of the fascist period and its long term influence, the first period happened during the Sixties and Seventies, within an ample societal discontinuity affecting all institutions: family and school, church and state, prison, and mental hospital. We can call it "the reformist period" because there were many new laws regarding schools ,teachers, pupils, and parents. In particular, the public debate about education, was, above all else, between very different secular and catholic points of view. The second phase starts at the beginning of the Nineties. The crisis of public administration caused a drastic drop in great educational themes and instead organisational solutions were sought to address problems within the school system. The third moment of change, from the Nineties until today, was characterized by neo-liberal topics and arguments. The political slogan was "a new school with English, business and IT.” Only during the first phase can we find a public discussion about the role and the specific competencies of the teacher. In fact, the centralized national system of recruitment never changed. However, if we listen to the voices of teachers and trainee teachers in the period from the Nineties, it is possible to discover a similarly vibrant and rich debate about trainee teachers' personal moral and political values and, more in general, about the role of the teacher in society. This is particularly the case if we look at primary teachers who traditionally have received much more of a pedagogical, didactical and practical training than secondary graduates. In addition, any insights into values development in primary teacher education must be viewed in the context of the role of school trade unions and teacher associations in generating debate. This paper 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. Still today, we can observe this values-based dialectic between teachers and policy-makers. For better or worse, today's school climate is the result of this historical dialectic.