This article seeks to discuss the relations between reading and writing against the historical backdrop of the initial affirmation of the "studia humanitatis" in fifteenth-century renaissance Italy and its initial movement towards the North of Europe. It focuses first on the theory of education and learning expressed in the Treatises of…

The links between tracked secondary schooling and social selection form part of a complex narrative regarding educational inequality in European schools. The relative contribution of family and school to unequal educational outcomes has dominated educational debates across the continent for more than 50 years. This article contributes to this…

In this paper, we analyse social inequalities along the horizontal dimension of education in Italy. More precisely, we focus on the role of family background in completing specific fields of study at both secondary and tertiary levels of education. To mitigate the limitations of the traditional sequential model, we construct a typology of…

In Italy, as in other European countries, students of foreign origin are over-represented in the vocational school tracks, with relevant consequences on their limited chances of attaining a university degree. While research has long underlined the weight that a family's social, cultural and economic capital has on a child's school performance,…