Career guidance and neoliberal rationality in Italian schools

Abstract

Italy has amongst the highest rates of youth unemployment in Europe. With occupational opportunities constantly eroded by restructuring and downsizing in the manufacturing sector, particularly for unskilled and low-skilled workers, the number of individuals living in poverty is rising dramatically (ISTAT, 2016a, 2016b). In this context, education constitutes a key arena of competition, and a means of acquiring strategic resources to reduce the risk of downward mobility and social exclusion. On the one hand, education is vital in reproducing social privilege within the context of a shrinking middle class (Bagnasco, 2016; Gornick & Jäntii, 2013); on the other, it is increasingly needed to protect the working class from crossing the poverty line (Field, 2006; Gallino, 2014; ISTAT, 2016b). This has led to a situation in which the work of teachers, but also guidance professionals, particularly those working with younger pupils, is highly complex, challenging and political (Sultana, 2014a, 2014b). How guidance practices support and contribute to shaping educational trajectories can either reinforce existing inequalities—and the ideological frameworks that produce and legitimise them—or reduce them by opening up spaces for social mobility and by questioning the symbolic and material structures that enable them (Hooley & Sultana, 2016; Watts, 1996). In this chapter, I provide a critical analysis of a set of guidance practices observed through an ethnographic study conducted in two schools located in an urban area characterised by various dimensions of educational and social disadvantage. Although the practices observed cannot encompass the vast heterogeneity of guidance activities carried out within the Italian school system, I argue that they constitute a useful case to study the enactment of mainstream guidance policy discourse. In particular—and differently from my earlier work, which gave detailed descriptions of specific guidance devices and their impacts on educational choice (Romito, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c; 2015; 2016a, 2016b, 2017)—my aim here is to evaluate and discuss how multiple guidance practices, inspired by different logics and enacted by different subjects, coexist and operate jointly. While these practices aim to warn students and protect them from future educational failure and social exclusion, I show that they risk having the ‘perverse effect’ of limiting the horizon of possibilities for underprivileged students (Hodkinson, 1998; see also the chapter by Vieira et al. in Career Guidance for Social Justice). Moreover, I point out that these practices encourage students to be (1) autonomous and responsible for their choices and (2) adaptable to the presumed requests of the current economic and labour market context. The fact that these imperatives constitute part of the ‘educational’ message transmitted to students at a relatively young age (12–13 years) is a paradigmatic example of how neoliberal discourse is penetrating (and transforming) the ways in which teachers and guidance practitioners make sense of their educational task (Laval, Clement, & Dreux, 2012).