The Educational Pathway of Young Neets between Cultural Deprivation and Risk of Social Exclusion.

The young people who are not in education and employment in Italy are a deep-rooted phenomenon among the young population. If on the one hand there is a constant decrease of NEET, with a shift from 25% (2018) to 18.4% (2023); on the other hand, in Europe, Italy remains at the bottom, with an average of about 10 percentage points more.

According to Eurostat data, educational opportunities greatly affect the condition of the youngest.

In Italy in 2022, 19% of 15-29 year olds were NEET. The percentage drops to 14% among those with a university degree and rises among those with lower (19.4%) and higher (20.3%) secondary education.

These data signal the difficulty of the education system in developing the skills and competences of young people and has a direct impact on their life paths.

Within this framework, the emotional states that accompany young people on their educational paths have a negative impact on their lives. Very often, they are convinced that they are victims of a system that leaves them waiting perennially for a job, they are actually the architects of a self-exclusion resulting from the internalisation of biographical careers marked by social isolation and cultural deprivation. They seem to be afflicted by the ‘Donald Duck syndrome’ because they live in a condition in which passivity, disorientation, and recrimination are combined with vague and confused ideas about the possibilities of social integration. They live in a disillusioned perception of work of which they can only see the most painful side instead of experiencing it as a drive towards self-realisation. The element that weighs even more heavily in these situations is the certainty that the longer they ‘wait’ in the family, the less chance they will have of developing the ability to get out of conditions of immobility.