Civic and citizenship education: Practices, policies and the symbolic action of politics in Italy

Citizenship education has a lengthy history in the Italian school system. A course in «Civic Education» was first introduced in the late 1950s (Presidential Decree 585/1958), which required that secondary school history classes devote two compulsory hours per month to the subject. This was followed by a long series of guidelines, ministerial directives, regulations and laws which have redesigned the course from time to time. The repeated changes, even in the name of the course itself, indicate how citizenship education is particularly sensitive to different sociocultural seasons and attempts at political socialization. Drawing on data collected in the 2016 International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS), this paper examines the key points of the most recent teaching reform (Law 92/2019), illustrating how citizenship education, despite the government rhetoric surrounding it, still has difficulty in setting young people on a pathway to inclusion, co-planning and active participation that can effectively transform civic and citizenship education.