Italian University in the 1950s: from the failure of the Gonella reform to the introduction of the Ten-Year Plan

Abstract

Starting from the Gonella reform’s failure to reorganize the entire Italian training system, up to the introduction of the Ten-Year Plan, the aim of this article is to reconstruct the most significant events in Italian academia and higher education during the 1950s. Using a wide range of archival and print sources, this contribution firstly analyses the main critical points in academia and the Ministry of Education during that timeframe, and then investigates the deceptive attempt of the Ten-Year Plan proposed by Fanfani’s second Government. The Plan, which considered educational development as a matter of social justice and evaluated human resources, was intended to relaunch a comprehensive and structural reform of education and schools. In this decade, which was characterized by so-called «administrative management», an insidious Parliamentary debate was especially avoided through limited measures and legislative provisions.