The Impact of Economic Inequality on Early School Dropout

The overall improvement, recorded in recent years, at European and national level, of the early school leaving, should not cause neglect of two aspects: the strong weight of internal disparities (9.6% is the European average, 11.5% is the average in Italy) and the lack of skills; in all European countries, low levels of socio-economic status are accompanied by high percentages in terms of poor skills. De facto, the condition of socio-economic, cultural. and educational poverty of the family very frequently represents the main “barrier” for a student, that feeds (and does not contrast) the early school leaving. Furthermore, this paper initiates a first reflection on the role of digitalisation, certainly, decisive in reducing the digital divide, as one of the multiple aspects of the implicit dispersion, but it means a resource or rather a limit in relation to the explicit one.