Chequered Routes to Secondary Education: Italy

Abstract

Secondary schooling has always been a crucial component in building individual and collective identities based on shared knowledge and values; nonetheless, it has received little attention in Italian historiography. Even studies of the ginnasi and licet, central to the education of the nation’s ruling classes, are few; the situation is still worse for technical, vocational, and teacher training schools. The prevailing approach has favored pedagogical and philosophical debates over models of secondary schooling or investigation of institutional vicissitudes. Scant attention has been devoted to its actual protagonists—the teachers, the head teachers, the pupils, who for us today are unfamiliar figures.³ This is even more the case for girls, who only began to appear in postprimary schooling in Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century, because of a widespread lack of interest and die-hard reticence about the suitability of giving lower-middle-class women (and even those of bourgeois and noble families) knowledge that went beyond the basics, sometimes bolstered by lessons in etiquette, drawing, music, and dance.

Translated by Karen Whittle.