Abstract
The paper focuses the attention on a series of memories written by Italian teachers between the second half of the nineteenth century and the fall of the fascist regime. In some cases these memories refer to teachers’ first years of work, while in other cases they report a personal analysis of their life spent for the youth education. Under a diachronic aspect, they all offer interesting suggestions to reconstruct the teacher’s profile and socioeconomic status and also to study the elementary school model. The teachers remember their study experiences; describe the difficulties of a problematic and often itinerant life; provide accurate information on their teaching methods; reveal not always achievable aspirations; show a clear perception of themselves and of their role with a marked gender difference. Teachers’ words also present a quite complete framework of different school aspects: buildings; furniture and teaching materials; curricular programs; school population; type of classes. From the North to the South, the importance attributed by Italian teachers to the relational aspects was demonstrated by the strong attention to establish close contacts with students’ families, with colleagues, and with religious, political and school authorities. This aspect shows the teachers’ idea of an educational mission that went beyond the classrooms.
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Notes
- 1.
The Archivio Diaristico Nazionale founded in 1984 by Tutino at Pieve Santo Stefano in the province of Arezzo, holds a large corpus of autobiographical writings (diaries, letters, memoirs). Cf. Brighigni (2008).
- 2.
The memoirs written in the 1990s and early 2000s provide us with retrospective reconstructions of school life during the Second World War and the decades immediately following it.
- 3.
Paolo Carrara devotes some ten pages of his account to his experience teaching members of the “Bologna” 40th Infantry Battalion: his pupils were twenty soldiers from the south of Italy, to whom he taught the rudiments of reading and writing.
- 4.
Most of the memoirs are provided with an index that mirrors their organization into sections or paragraphs. The authors seem to draw on multiple sources: loose notes, material from personal journal entries, class records. Some draw exclusively on their own recollections, primarily those they consider reliable.
- 5.
This body provided welfare and primary education to the less well off in the rural areas around Rome. Founded in the early 1900s by a group of women from the Roman branch of the Unione femminile nazionale, it became progressively independent of the mother organization, setting up adult education classes and nursery schools whose programmes and calendars were suited to the demands of rural life (Alatri 2000).
- 6.
The “Casati Law” of 13 November 1859 made the municipal authorities wholly responsible for primary education, from identifying suitable school premises to covering the running costs of schools, in addition to recruiting the teachers and paying their salaries (Morandini 2003 ) .
- 7.
The 87-page text, which was not divided into sections, was published in an appendix to the newspaper of the Opera Nazionale Balilla, La Palestra Fascista, on 21 September 1930 (n. 38). The expression Gentile reform refers to the reorganization of the entire educational system effected by the famous philosopher through a series of royal decrees issued in 1923, covering, respectively, secondary education (6 May), school management (16 July), university education (30 September), and primary education (1 October) (see Charnitzky 1996).
- 8.
Prior to this, primary school teachers had been required to attend the scuole normali which, founded by Minister Lanza in 1858, offered a three year secondary school programme for trainee primary teachers. On the figure of the primary teacher in Italy, see: Covato (1994), Di Pol (1998), Santoni Rugiu (2006), Chiosso (2007).
- 9.
This legislative change, introduced by Daneo-Credaro, was to be extended, during the Fascist period, to all the municipalities in Italy (Betti 1998).
- 10.
This is the third edition: the first came out in 1874, the second in 1885. The number of editions reflects wide circulation achieved by the book, also borne out by the many articles about it that appeared in both specialized education journals and the general press.
- 11.
Vella also introduced her students to other great works of Italian literature: from St. Francis’ Canticle of Creation to Dante’s Divine Commedy, of which she attempted the reading of the first canto.
- 12.
This detailed account includes the actual exam topics: the essay question was on identifying means of harmonizing and integrating the educational action of the family with that of the school; the oral examination involved giving a lesson to a group of fifth class primary school children on the subject of alcoholic drinks.
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Morandini, M.C. (2017). Telling a Story, Telling One’s Own Story: Teachers’ Diaries and Autobiographical Memories as Sources for a Collective History. In: Yanes-Cabrera, C., Meda, J., Viñao, A. (eds) School Memories. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44063-7_8
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