Digitalization and the education system. What prospects for building a truly inclusive system?

The chapter examines the digital transition of the education system as a lever for — and, at the same time, a potential threat to — genuine inclusion. Drawing on the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, it argues that the digital divide cannot be reduced to a gap in individual skills or household income, but stems from a combination of infrastructural, territorial, organisational and pedagogical factors that, if neglected, turn digitalisation into a new vehicle of inequality. Through a reading of the Italian National Plan for the Digital School and of the measures introduced by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRP) — in particular the "School 4.0" line and the actions against educational poverty — the work proposes a systemic, multidimensional approach in which infrastructure, governance, teacher training and the "educating community" converge toward a school capable of guaranteeing the right to education as a foundation of substantive equality and citizenship.