The Need for a Recovery of Educational Theory: The Italian Case

If institutional changes can be construed as signs of the emergence of new needs and aspirations, one can state that in Italy the need for a recovery of educational theory has been moving again to the foreground. To be sure, Italian educational research has always had a fundamentally theoretical (if not decidedly philosophical) thrust and many could plausibly insinuate that this has always been so predominant as to create a gulf between academic scholarship in education and real pedagogical practice. However, it is to note that only during the last four years has a SIG on Educational Theory been established within the Italian scientific society that gathers together all the scholars in education studies widely understood. Additionally, the foundation of a new scientific society, in which the fostering of the cultivation of educational theory is at the very centre of its mission, is another institutional event that seems to move in the same direction. This ‘institutionalized’ interest in educational theory may have a different meaning in comparison with what (has) happened in other phases of the Italian history of the field: with a grain of simplification but arguably without any distortion of reality, we can say that a great part of the educational debate of the second half of the 20th century was devoted to defining the specific status of educational theory as clearly distinct, but not completely disconnected, from philosophy of education. This was (or has been) an important undertaking insofar as the institution of the field, in the first part of the 20th century, (had) had a markedly philosophical character, which de facto resolved educational theory into philosophy. In the present-day scenario, instead, the focus on educational theory can be interpreted as a response to the pressures of other kinds of discourse (and of empirical research), which tend to sidestep – despite any lip service – the endeavours of ‘merely’ theoretical inquiry as insignificant for the thriving of the disciplinary domain. The aim of this paper is not that of reconstructing the struggle of Italian education studies to become less “elusive” but, on the one hand, that of presenting the regime of relationships between philosophy of education and educational theory in the Italian debate and, on the other, of making clear the trajectories along which the significance of theory for practice is valorized (also in view of the formal professionalization of educators, which has occurred very recently in Italy).