THE ITALIAN SCHOOL DURING TWENTY-YEARS FASCISM (1923–1943)

At the end of the First World War, Italy was in a crisis that testifed to the ultimate inadequacy of the liberal political system to deal with the country's problems. Te solution fnds its origin in the seizure of power by Fascism, which brings to completion a coherent ambitious school emblem characterized by centralization, centrality of classical secondary education, which has a historical approach to the study of languages according to the philosophy of actual idealism of Giovanni Gentile, who was minister in the Prime Government of Mussolini, from 1923 to 1924. Elementary education was redesigned according to the idea of a creative and imaginative child, who would be educated also thanks to an instrumental use of the Catholic religion and Italian dialects. Instead, a harsh policy of denationalization of the populations of the new German-speaking (South Tyrol /South Tyrol) and Slavophone (Venezia Giulia) provinces acquired by the Kingdom of Italy afer the last treaties of the First World War was attempted. Tis reform reshaped the contents of the teaching and consequently produced a new generation of manuals and annotated texts in the various disciplines. Fascism gradually attempted to organize aspects of physical-political education and organization outside the school. Te tools of such education, the sports facility colonies and some colleges, were also forms of welfare that helped generate consensus in the face of a regime that brutally opposed widespread needs and forms of collective consumption in sports and recreation. In the 1930s, a new scenario emerged against the backdrop of increasing state intervention in response to the Great Depression and the institutional redefnition of the relational system with the Catholic Church sanctioned by the 1929 Lateran Pacts, which extended the teaching of the Catholic religion to secondary schools. A new organic attempt to create an education and a fascist school, with the aim of perpetuating the fascist state beyond the generation of the founders, was designed by Giuseppe Bottai, an intellectual and politician of great importance who was Minister of National Education from 1936 to 1943, with the School Charter of 1939, a programmatic document that outlined the summary of a new reform that would surpass Gentile’s by providing for a school for all, although diferentiated according to criteria of achievement and political homogeneity of teachers and learners. Te concrete legislative acts during Bottai’s term were the racial laws of 1938 against the so-called “Jewish race” and the partial standardization of the first grade of secondary school with the 1940 law.