Governare il cambiamento. Sperimentazione e società nella scuola superiore italiana tra anni Settanta e Ottanta.

This thesis concerns the attempts to manage the long and chaotic experimental phase triggered in 1974 by delegated decrees in senior secondary education in Italy until 1988, when the italian government instructed the Brocca commission in order to summarize this process. The delegated decrees represent the first step of a path never taken towards the reform of senior secondary education: they are the result of the debate triggered by the explosion of the Sixty-eight in that school level and of the multiple expectations placed in the school as an instrument of intervention on social reality. In particular, the experiments launched through art. 3 of decree 419/74 attempted to set up a new relationship between school and territory: they reflect the choices of students and their families, teachers and local and regional authorities, Ministry of Education and school administration, aimed at trying to manage changes in center-periphery relations. Indeed, some of those experimental experiences crossed the climate of social conflict in the Seventies and continued also during the Eighties, a decade that latest historical studies consider central to the redefinition of political and cultural structure of European societies. In the educational field, the Eighties saw the affirmation of the new cultural and economic paradigm of human capital: a way to respond to the progressive loss of centrality of the school within an increasingly broad and crowded formal and informal educational landscape, that gave life to a new idea of educational system, characterized by school autonomy and the redefiniction of the role of the State. These experimental experiences can help us highlight the times and ways of this transition in Italy, showing us how the institution-school attempted to respond to transformations of italian society in the Eighties, when the centrifugal forces triggered by the crisis of the Seventies took more strength, making clear the crisis in the political system that had supported the Republic since the post-war period.