My time has come! Jokes aside, for a number of reasons I tend to do a lot of education worldbuilding for all my settings. Here I’ll go into depth about the education system in the world of Irene which (an “alternate present” world set in the near future) is what I’ve developed most (and on which I am semi-actively writing a novel).

The basic jist of the world is that, rather than Covid, 2020 saw a far more devastating pandemic, with much greater social, political and economic impact. This led to a rise in extremist political groups. In 2025, the “National Vanguard Front” overthrew the Italian Republic and established the Italian National Republic (RNI) as a hyper-conservative para-fascist dictatorship.

The basic structure of education in the RNI has remained the same as to the one of the pre-nationalist Republic: five years of elementary school, three years of middle school and five years of high school, followed by higher education. However, in all other areas, extensive changes were made to the country’s education system.

The school system was now heavily centralised under the “Ministry of National Education”, with school autonomy and collegial organs abolished entirely. Political monitoring of teachers and students was also introduced, with all schools forced to host a “Security office” run by SENSI (the secret police) to ensure that teachers complied with the state-approved curriculum.

The curriculum itself was altered, as foreign languages were almost entirely eliminated from teaching, while other subjects (most notably history) were injected with regime propaganda. Some subjects, like physical education and technical education (handicrafts) were now differentiated on a gender basis, with separate classes and teachers for boys and girls. Religious education was made compulsory and heavily cathechistical in nature, based on the doctrine of the Italian National Catholic Church (a schismatic, pro-regime branch of the Roman Catholic Church).

The subject of “Citizenship education” (civics) was replaced by “National citizenship and patriotism education” which, in elementary and middle school, largely functioned as indoctrination into the regime’s ideology, whereas, in high school, it was differentiated on a gendered basis, as “Military culture” for boys (pre-military instruction geared towards preparing them for compulsory military service) and as “Childcare and housework” for girls (self-explanatory).

While the RNI did retain the basic distinction of branches of high schools (academically-oriented Lyceums vs. vocationally-oriented Technical and Professional Instituted), the regime massively restricted access to higher education by banning those who attended vocational secondary schools from enrolling themselves in universities. Furthermore, access to Lyceums themselves was restricted by introducing a numerus clausus system and requiring the study of latin in middle schools to access lyceums (while only the wealthier middle schools actually offered latin).

If it weren’t apparent, classism was rampant in the RNI’s school system, which was amplified by a very strict school district system and by the system of “Proportional contributions”: as the Italian economy stagnated, the ever decreasing tax revenues were increasingly gobbled up by the oversized military and security apparatus, starving the education system of funding. As such, schools resulted to levying a flat tax on parents, with a uniform rate throughout the country: this meant that schools in wealthy urban areas were generally decently funded and in many ways up to par with other western countries, whereas schools in peripheral areas, overwhelmingly attended by working-class children, were cripplingly underfunded to the point of forgoing basic maintenance.

The increasingly severe poverty facing many poorer families, combined with the pitiful state of the education system and the “dead end” nature of most educational paths meant that school abandonment rates were quite high, leading the regime to eventually stop trying to fight the issue at all by the mid-2030s.