«The Italian didactic secret». Teachers’ education according to Giuseppe Lombardo-Radice’s thought

A hundred years after the reform of the Italian school carried out in 1923 by the minister Giovanni Gentile, it could be useful to meditate on the great role recognised to the teachers’ education, especially on the primary school ones detailed in the programmes set by Giuseppe Lombardo Radice. What he used to consider the «Italian didactic secret» consisted in an education that consistently conjugated theory and practice, namely a philosophy-based pedagogy looking to the newest outcomes of the psychological researches and opened to the modern experimentations of the activism, but strictly refusing any didactic pre-established and rigid “method”. In particular Lombardo Radice criticised the claim according to which the pedagogy had to focus on the child, indulging his or her spontaneity, while the main task of pedagogy is to define the educator’s profile. The claim of children’s spontaneity derives from a mistaken comprehension of Rousseau’s work: even if the child is actually spontaneous, that spontaneity shows itself inside an educative room under the strict control of the pedagogue, who cannot neglect it. The main risk in the activist pedagogical approach, according to Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, was to «close children in their infantility», instead to lead them to adulthood. This risk can be avoided through the education of authoritative and trustworthy teachers, as cultivated people in whom children could see some models of wise and sensibile adults. It is culture to assure authority to the teacher: he or she possesses knowledge and competence that the child does not have, but that he aspire to conquer in order to leave childhood.