Governments continuously design and redesign higher education policies, and governmental capacities are the pillars for undertaking these tasks during the formulation stage. This paper considers the assumption that different governmental political and technical capacities shape different spaces for action and thus different types of policy design.…

The aim of the article is to investigate the profile of comparative education in Italy, highlighting those elements that have characterised its development in relation to the cultural and political features of the country. This approach inevitably involves the comparison of Italy's specific particularities to those of other countries in the north…

The high degree of comprehensibility between the signed languages in Trieste (present-day Italy) and Austria is very probably due to their joint history of deaf schools within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Investigation undertaken in archives in Trieste and Klagenfurt has revealed interesting similarities in the education of deaf children there…

In the current context of intensified moves towards educational deregulation, the configuration of the Italian middle school and its relationship to education governance is an interesting case. Historically, it represents a unique example of the successful "decision-making" model of the welfarist era. Despite some internal constraints,…

Understanding today's Vocational Education and Training (VET) systems requires a comprehension of the rise and development, i.e. of the foundations of topical VET. This book provides a comparative view of its development in Europe. The contributions of renowned authors give insight into conceptual questions, cases, and challenges in this field.

The relationship between the state and higher education institutions has always been a complex one. The "state" itself in this context is a heterogeneous mix of elite people--bureaucrats, politicians, committees of co-opted academics and business leader--and it increasingly faces pressures from diverse stakeholders, including students…

This article presents a brief analysis of teacher education in five European countries: Italy, Germany, England, Sweden and Finland. In the post-industrial world, the sense of teaching has profoundly changed, influenced by a rapidly evolving socio-economic context. The responses given by each country are different, but two tendencies emerge: on…

In Italian secondary schools, it is not literature that is studied but the history of literature; it is not philosophy that is studied but the history of philosophy. Similarly, in higher education, history students even have to take an exam in the history of historiography. This is to say that in Italy, history plays a key cultural role. That is…

Published as a stimulus to further studies in comparative education and comparative adult education, this book is an English edition of most of the papers presented in June 1978, at an international seminar held in West Berlin on "The Universities and Adult Education: Trends and Perspectives in Europe." The introduction, by Wolfgang…

After World War II, American scholars rewrote Italian school syllabi and textbooks to replace Fascist ideology with democratic ideas. John Dewey's progressive ideas were influential, until a restorative backlash of the Cold War almost eliminated them from policy documents. Since the sixties, however, Dewey's pedagogical thinking has regained…

The history of European higher education, particularly in a period of crisis and change such as the Napoleonic era (1789-1815), illustrates how the differences between university systems in different countries give insight into cultural traditions and historical conditions in each country. Analysis looks at circumstances in Britain, France,…

After a brief outline of the educational situation and the social framework in Italy which developed after the second world war, this article explores the future of the Italian school system. (Author/RK)

Discusses how the idea that increasing literacy among the masses would result in disinterest in manual labor and increased social unrest affected education in Italy between 1809-1939. Government policies, which called for manual labor programs in primary schools to provide realistic training for students from lower socio-economic classes, are…

The relationship between business cycles and expansion in higher education in 1870-1985 is analyzed and compared for Germany, Italy, France, the United States, and Japan. In most countries, expansion corresponded to economic recession. Spectral analysis, used to explore the cyclical character of the phenomenon, was found to be a powerful…

This publication contains a sampling of conference papers delivered at the first European Economic Community (E.E.C.) Working Conference on Economics Education held at St. Ignatius University, Antwerp in September, 1976. Invited representative participants from the nine E.E.C. countries met to discuss common problems relating to economics in upper…