Teacher Training in Italy

This contribution’s primary goal is to analyse the teachers training and re-training system in Italy, with special attention to the current problem of the academic training of all teachers. The contribution will also embrace some research works on Italian teachers of primary education attitudes and representations concerning their profession. The Italian teacher training system grew up, starting from the beginning (the Casati Act, 1859) as a sort of appendix of the whole school system, without a general framework able to identify social needs and training abilities. The political level of decision always neglected the need of existing teachers, following the way of inverting the logical sequence of the reform acts, first reviewing the state-of-the-art (and teachers are an important component of this state) and then proposing solutions to the weak point of the system. As we have seen also recently, the idea seems to be that teachers have to obey to the new decisions about the school system, without having contributing to form them: the approach of reformers is engineering-oriented. The reaching of the academic level of all the teacher training courses is really important, but it is not sufficient: many new decisions about the school system were implemented in the early 2000 without thinking to the impact they would have had on the teacher training system, in charge to another Ministry.