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The issue of the quality of the school and its contents registers a chilling silence, and the coronavirus emergency has nothing to do with it
by Lucio d’Alessandro *
The issue of the quality of the school and its contents registers a chilling silence, and the coronavirus emergency has nothing to do with it
5 ‘reading
August 31 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of one of the most internationally renowned Italian women. Schools inspired by the method of Maria Montessori (1870-1952) are still present in many countries of the world today, just as many were the States that, after their break with the fascism with which they initially collaborated, welcomed them triumphantly, from the United States to India to Holland, to Ghana that, just after the approval of her Constitution (1951) and with a view to final independence, she asked him to organize the School of the nascent Republic: now over eighty years old but indomitable, Montessori accepted. Death struck her shortly after in Noordwijk, the Netherlands, where she lived for the past few years.
The anniversary coincides with the year in which the school subject dominates the public debate as never before in all republican history, to the point that a government that until now has proven its incalculable value seems suspended to the fate of the reopening, in conditions of better or worse viability, of the school year in question. However, don’t be fooled: this is a mere coincidence. Not only because, conspicuously, Montessori pedagogy was based on freedom of “movement” even in the classroom for students, while under the current pandemic moons the various committees recommend keeping them tied to desks, although, in some cases, with the convenience of wheels
Indeed, the post-Risorgimento and the social inspiration of Montessori, such as that of De Amicis or the Risorgimento and feminine of Adelaide Pignatelli, founder of the Suor Orsola University of Naples and, again, the ministerial action of Francesco De Sanctis, Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile knew very well that only one education Put together education and instructionby ultimately privileging the values of culture, it could have given Italy those citizens and that ruling class that that phase of the country’s constitution showed the need.
I think we can say, in partial consonance with the theses of a (poignant and beautiful) book by Galli della Loggia with the title revealed, after one year, singularly prophetic (“The Empty Corridor”), that the school triad education- Culture has played a strategic role in the history of Italy from unification to the mid-20th century, allowing a “poor state” to become one of the top ten economies in the world. I think it is also true that the action of the Italian teachersIn that cultural climate, it was decisive and that a triad of ministers from the south (De Sanctis, Croce and Gentile) of great culture and idealistic or neo-idealist inspiration gave Italy a school capable of allowing a generalized education of its citizens and a ruling class equal to a great European country.
Only Mussolini’s greed to attribute to himself all the good in Italy, and then the myopia of the Marxist left to negatively consider everything he knew of merit and selection, made the Gentile reform possible, which happily concluded that process. cultural and institutional past the “most fascist of reforms”. As if the proponents of the Marxist front of Italian pedagogy, focused on the edition of the beautiful magazine “La Riforma della scuola”, were not also children of that classical culture desired by Gentile, beginning with the director and founder Lucio Lombardo Radice, son of that Giuseppe who had been Gentile’s greatest collaborator in the ministerial years. The truth is that, despite its defects, it was really a “good school” and, therefore, also a form of education in freedom and in the development of a critical spirit.
