Silent revolutions. Reforming school boards in 1970s Italy

Up to nowadays, few research has been dealt with the so-called decreti delegati – i.e., the decrees Italian State enacted in 1974 for renovating scholastic governance. The paper aims at exploring how teachers, pupils and parents looked at the decrees and reacted to them. Sources as booklets and magazines are retrieved for the purpose. The paper shows a segmented framework: the new organisms introduced for guaranteeing school governance innovated Italian school radically and rationalized the way each school dealt with democratic participation which, since 1968, have been depending on headmasters’ political opinion. However, several elements introduced by the decrees jeopardized democratic participation and effectiveness in some of the most radical institutions they introduced. This event occurred, for example, with scholastic districts: even they were set up amidst the hope they would have guaranteed democratic participation, they were deprived by any deliberating power.