Introduction

The chapter presents an analysis of the relationship between youth and education, in particular non-formal education, based on the attempt to complement three vantage points: one referring to the past, with an analysis of (under-recognised) sociological traditions; one referring to the present, examining the effects produced by large-scale programmes for youth and one looking to the future, with the description of a series of activities carried out to facilitate the recognition of the relevance of non-formal education for everyday youth life.

It is also a tentative account of the activities carried out at the crossroads between sociological tradition, field research and public engagement in the context of the REadY lab (Research on non-formal Education and Youth work) at the Department of Political and Social Studies, University of Salerno.

In relation to the first aspect, the chapter will concentrate on some illustrations, each representing a different period (up to the early 1980s) and perspective of the sociological analysis of the relationship between youth and education.

It will follow an outline of the results of the Italian section of the RAY project (‘Research-based analysis of European youth programmes’), developed by a European network and aimed at analysing both the educational outcomes of youth learning mobility as well as the non-formal educational practices developed through ‘Erasmus+: Youth in Action’.

The third step is a preliminary account of a series of public engagement activities connected to the contribution through a dialogue between research, policy and practices aimed at recognising and developing the contribution of non-formal education and youth work in youth policies.

This develops in the recognition of the ‘continuum in education’, with it being the interaction between formal, non-formal and informal educational contexts in which the logic of traditional separation must be overcome to embed integration into education.

Traces of an Open-Ended Debate

The question of education has always been at the core of sociological debate, as can be seen in the work of classical thinkers (Ribolzi 2012; Besozzi 2017). However, for a long time and until the 1970s, at both the theoretical and empirical levels, sociology significantly reduced it, understanding it almost exclusively in a ‘formal’ sense, as a vertical and intentional process of transmission that takes shape within a specific institutional dimension – the school, the university (Giovannini 1987).