Abstract
Antonio Gramsci is arguably Italy’s most cited author in the literature concerning the politics of education. His contribution to educational thought is immense in that, in order to do justice to his thinking on education, one cannot simply restrict oneself to his concerns about schooling or deal with specific aspects of his thought in isolated fashion. One needs to treat his work as a coherent body of thinking on politics and education, with hegemony serving as the central concept in his ‘philosophy of praxis’, every relationship of which is a pedagogical relationship. Rather than focus on his specific writings on particular sites of educational practice, be they schools, island prison learning centres or workers’ education circles, or, as is common when dealing with other political theorists, glean ideas from his political philosophy and draw out their implications for education, this chapter views Gramsci’s overall political project as a broad educational project. Being central to the workings of hegemony, in all its different social relational dimensions, education has to be viewed holistically as its presence can be felt throughout Gramsci’s whole corpus of writing; the quest for a process of ‘intellectual and moral reform’ warrants an educational effort on all fronts.
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These contributors would include don Lorenzo Milani, Alberto Manzi, Danilo Dolci, Aldo Capitini and Mario Lodi who all deserve greater recognition in the non-Italian firmament than is the case at present. I will not enter debates on the respective merits of these figures. Milani, with his emphasis on older learners teaching younger ones, the class politics of public schooling and reading history against the grain, invites parallels with Gramsci and so does Dolci with his frequent references to and treatment of the ‘questione meridionale’ (Southern Question). Others like Lodi, and I would add once more Milani, would offer contrasts with Gramsci with respect to writing with their ‘collective cooperative writing’ approach. All these aspects deserve wider treatment beyond the scope of this essay. The focus of the discussions, in this volume, however, is Gramsci. I simply want to acknowledge, at the very outset, the view that there is more to Italy and critical education, or critical pedagogy for that matter, than simply Gramsci. This is not to diminish in any way Gramsci’s contribution that is great but to place on record the names of others, from the same country, who have contributed to critical educational thought. May more volumes like this one be dedicated to the work of each.
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One comes across two meanings regarding ‘passive revolution’, originally used by the nineteenth-century Neapolitan writer, Vincenzo Cuoco. Adam D. Morton (2011) argues that the term is used ‘First, with reference to a revolution without mass participation, or a “revolution from above”, involving elite-engineered social and political reform that draws on foreign capital and associated ideas while lacking a national-popular base’ (p. 38). Arguably the other more important use of the term is ‘to capture how a revolutionary form of political transformation is pressed into a conservative project of restoration. In this second sense, passive revolution is linked to insurrectionary mass mobilisation from below while such class demands are restricted so that “changes in the world of production are accommodated within the current social formation”’ (Ibid.)
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Necessity for the ideological preparation of the masses.
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The Red 2 years.
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For all the hardships and painful estrangement it caused, imprisonment kept Gramsci away from the clutches of Stalin and the stultifying effects these could have had on the Sardinian’s theoretical formulations.
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In the notes on the ‘Unitarian School’, in Notebooks 4 and 12 (Gramsci 1975), Gramsci states that he would rather prefer a ‘mediocre’ teacher who dwells on facts to someone who engages in a kind of laissez-faire pedagogy that is detrimental to those students who lack the ‘cultural capital to learn what is powerful from other sources’ (‘invisible pedagogies’ to use a recent term): ‘In reality a mediocre teacher may manage to see to it that his pupils become more informed, although he will not succeed in making them better educated; he can devote a scrupulous and bureaucratic conscientiousness to the mechanical part of teaching’[sic] (Gramsci 1971, p. 36). (My emphasis in italics.)
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Mayo, P. (2017). Gramsci, Hegemony and Educational Politics. In: Pizzolato, N., Holst, J.D. (eds) Antonio Gramsci: A Pedagogy to Change the World. Critical Studies of Education, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40449-3_2
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