Rethinking the Role of No Schooling during the Pandemic

The main aim of the issue is to stress how the emergency that Italy and the entire world has been going through since the end of 2019, with the terrifying experience of a global pandemic, produced – together with other more or less (un)predictable effects – the (re)emergence of an issue that has crossed the sociology of education since its foundation: the critical relationship between schooling and no schooling, or between the educational processes that take place in formal contexts and those that occur ‘outside’, in non-formal and informal. The same research clearly shows how these effects become more intense when considering that, because of the subsequent lockdowns, children, adolescents and young people not only have experienced the lack of (formal) educational opportunities (as described in the other chapters of this volume) but have also undergone the plunder of all these occasions connected – to name but a few – to physical, recreational and, more generally, extracurricular activities.