New York, Columbia University Press, 1982, pp.414.

Is the first comprehensive study of the historical transformation of the Italian educational system. It looks closely at the university and the secondary school, and the social forces which fought to realize changes over the course of more than a century. Far from the passive object of surrounding changes in society portrayed in many previous studies of western educational systems, the institution presented by Barbagli is shown to have always had fundamental and generally destabilizing effects on the social, political and economic structure of post- unification Italy. Thus the historical incapacity of successive Italian governments and regimes to confront the nation’s chronic imbalance between the supply of graduates and demand from the labor market has rendered the university and the secondary school continuously controversial. Why this might have been is the subject of Barbagli’s outstanding synthesis of meticulous historical reconstruction and nearly Cartesian analytic rigor. Reviews from the American Journal of Sociology, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Contemporary Sociology, The Journal of Higher Education.