The Pedagogy of Praxis and the Role of Education in the Prison Notebooks

Abstract

This chapter explores the relation between philosophy of praxis and pedagogy in the Prison Notebooks. It attempts to show how, on the one hand, the theme of education occupies a highly central role in Gramsci’s thought and, on the other, how education should be read in terms of a symbiotic relationship with the theoretical system focused on the question of praxis. First, by attempting to highlight the centrality of pedagogy in its vital connection with praxis, this chapter aims to show how the theme of education is the necessary consequence of a perspective that is centred on possibility and politics, and therefore revolves around the nucleus of education and the perspective of the organisation of the masses. Secondly, the present work tries to highlight the concrete vision of education outlined by Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks, as the direct derivation of his practical conception of human existence.

Translated by Steven Cenci

Modern man should be a synthesis of those traits that are…presumed as national characteristics: the American engineer, the German philosopher, the French politician, recreating, so to speak, the Italian man of the Renaissance, a modern type of Leonardo da Vinci who has become a mass-man or collective man while nevertheless maintaining his strong personality and originality as an individual. (Letter to his wife, August 1, 1932, Gramsci, LFP2, pp. 194–195)