Definition - Specific aspects

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In the framework of the historical-educational research, different juridical texts exist which allow us to retrace the history of the school, as well as the history of educational policies that have characterized each historical period. The school system is based on constitutional principles (like other fields, object of the welfare-state policies, such as health, assistance, social security etc.), therefore the first source of the school legislation is the Constitution itself. Consequently the management of the system as well as of the same instruction have to respect specific conditions, which are determined both by constitutional dispositions and by the ordinary law discipline.

Historical map of Northern Italy in 1842, from the Stieler's Handatlas, 2nd edition 1847, by M. Witkam, available within the section Cartes historiques of the web site in French language: http://www.sabaudia.org/v2/carte/index-histo.php.

Nowadays the school system is managed by the State – to which not only the duty/responsibility compete, to establish schools of each kind and level, but also to control the entire system – and by privates, who should respect the juridical order.

But in the school history the State management of the educational system represents a relatively re-cent conquest, which in the Italian peninsula was firstly introduced in the Regno di Sardegna (Kingdom of Sardinia, see the entry by the on-line Columbia Encyclopedia) with the Boncompagni Law of 1848, later confirmed – always in the dinia Kingdom – by the Casati Law Legge Casati) of 1859, which was subsequently extended to the entire Italian peninsula, the day after the national unification.
Therefore both the school legislation (of constitu-tional and ordinary nature) which was issued by the Unitarian State (after 1861), and the previous laws which were in force in the single pre-unification States, constitute for us an extraordinary historical source, in order to understand the development of educational policies which happened one after the other, over the centuries.

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