Youth, both the notion and the demographic, was a central theme of Fascism. Its associations with beginnings, strength, energy, virility, and optimism were fundamentally useful to a movement and regime founded in the aftermath of World War I that pledged to fight against anything “weakening” the Italian nation-state or race. Fascism was portrayed as a “magnificent adolescent” who heralded the resurrection of Italy’s innate strength and dominance in the world.1 Moreover, as one 1928 book dedicated to describing the importance of children to the Fascist Revolution stated, “it is the youth, the pure, the restorers, ‘the host of the fatherland,’ who will endure everything to fulfill their destiny and continuously raise up Italy.”2 It was Italy’s children who were primarily tasked with carrying out the long-term Fascist mission to reawaken the “stirpe that has slept for centuries in ignorance of its true power.”3 The negative influences of foreign powers, inept Italian leaders, and material decadence had submerged much of the evidence of Italians’ racial superiority; under the guidance of the Fascist state, however, children would have the capacity to harness the “twenty centuries” of history within their hearts and become the greatest representatives of the Italian race.4 The urgent question for the nascent Fascist regime then became, How could it transform these children physically, mentally, and spiritually into the New Italians who needed to create a New Italy and restore Italian glory?
The answer came in the development of a complex network of institutions designed to educate a new generation of Italians to embody italianità and take the lessons of Fascism to the broader realms of family and community. School and its ancillary organizations were primary tools the Fascist state used to establish and impart discourses of racial identity and biopower, and it is significant that the reformation of the education system was one of Benito Mussolini’s first priorities after becoming prime minister in 1922. At the same time, the development of a Fascist educational system in many ways resembled the Fascist “seizure” of power over all other aspects of the Italian bureaucracy, economy, and culture: Fascist leaders initially appeared to maintain continuity in educational policies and personnel but increasingly centralized and politicized the system. In other words, it took years for the regime to articulate and enact the changes they believed necessary for the system that was meant to transform Italy’s society and race; of course, this process was neither linear nor simple.
An important element in the first stage of this institutional and pedagogical evolution was the regime’s reliance on educationalists and welfare advocates who did not necessarily consider themselves Fascist but who considered Fascism to be a malleable project that could be made to fit their own visions of New Italians and a New Italy. A significant portion of the pedagogues in Mussolini’s first administration at the MPI were supporters of broader Western trends in education and health, and they seized the regime’s early calls for reform as an opportunity to restructure an educational system they considered stagnant and unproductive. Under the leadership of Minister Giovanni Gentile and his sweeping 1923 Gentile Reform, they argued that increased education of all kinds—humanistic and vocational, spiritual and physical—among all children would result in a stronger and healthier population as well as a more advanced and productive economy. Liberal Italy had generally supported such calls to action, but inadequate resources and other strains on the state largely limited education and health reforms in the kingdom to those carried out by independent or semiautonomous organizations.5 Though not without its own financial and infrastructural challenges, the Fascist regime, by contrast, prioritized the implementation of mandatory primary education and the centralization of the institutions tasked with accomplishing it. And yet the many educationalists who took advantage of this opportunity to pursue their own pedagogical ambitions would be forced to reevaluate their commitment to Fascism by the mid-1920s, especially in the aftermath of the 1924 Matteotti Crisis. Some, like the director general of elementary education, Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, chose to abandon the MPI and its increasingly unpalatable political project. Others, including Giovanni Gentile, became ever more convinced of the urgency of Fascism’s goals and ever more eager participants in the Fascist regime.
The Fascist education system of the 1920s unquestionably reflected more-general Western educational trends, but its ultimate objective reflected particularly Fascist aims. The system expected to create Italians who were not simply “fit” citizens but models of the Italian race who could fulfill the demands of the Fascist state. While there were numerous opinions about how such an objective could best be achieved, ministry pedagogues between 1922 and 1929 shared the belief that the ultimate beneficiary of education was to be the collective, not the individual. Likewise, the key architects of elementary-education reform in the 1920s, Gentile and Lombardo Radice, might not have personally espoused racial theories, but their collectivist language and pedagogical principles, firmly espoused in the 1923 Gentile Reform, would prove valuable frameworks within which Mussolini’s racial project could develop and thrive. Moreover, the founding of the ONMI in 1925 and the ONB in 1926 furthered the state’s pedagogical and political emphases on collective discipline, health, and physical strength. These characteristics of the expanded educational infrastructure, above all else, separated early Fascist education from contemporary pedagogical trends in Western Europe and the United States.
The primary administrator tasked with formulating a Fascist approach to the education of the Italian youth was the philosopher, pedagogue, and Mazzinian nationalist Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944). Serving as Mussolini’s minister of public instruction from 1922 to 1924, he grew up in the small village of Castelveltrano on the west coast of Sicily and only traveled to the Italian peninsula for the first time at the age of eighteen to begin his studies at the elite university Scuola normale superiore in Pisa. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Scuola normale was known as the most prestigious place in the Italian Kingdom to train as a teacher of the humanities and sciences, and Gentile had been one of four selected in 1893 to study under its renowned humanities faculty. His new environment, professors, and peers highlighted the stark distinctions between the provincial education of his childhood and the cosmopolitan pedagogy of Europe’s leading institutions.6 Consequently, Gentile’s experiences at the Scuola normale helped cultivate the young intellectual’s desire to reform the nation’s educational system in order to create a modern and united kingdom throughout all its regions. It was also in his first years in Pisa that Gentile began corresponding with the emerging philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce, who would become a significant influence in Gentile’s personal and professional life for the next three decades.7
Gentile used this period of intense collaboration with Croce to delineate the core of the philosophy he termed actual idealism (idealismo attuale). Actual idealism, also known as actualism, followed in the footsteps of early nineteenth-century German philosophical idealism that argued for a unifying explanation of the human experience. More specifically, Gentile built on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s theory that all constituent parts and experiences of the universe are integrated in the single concept of Geist (spirit).8 The Italian philosopher and subsequent actualists argued that there were “no ‘objective’ truths, if ‘objective’ was understood to mean that human senses and will had nothing to do with its determination.”9 However, actualism posited that reality was not an individual construction but rather a form of collective consciousness.10 This assertion offered a significant critique of Karl Marx’s interpretation of Hegelian idealism, particularly of his insistence that history was grounded entirely in a materialist dialectic. Gentile believed that nineteenth-century emphases on materialism and positivism had played a central role in the decline of European—and particularly Italian—society. Gentile’s philosophy therefore emphasized the values of voluntarism and sacrifice of the individual to the collective. The will of the individual lay at the heart of all action, but identification with a group or community—relational and collective experiences—was fundamental to that individual’s choices and, therefore, to the development of engaged members of society.11 As such, he argued, a strong national education system was critical to molding desired individual and group identities.12
Gentile’s view of the importance of education in modern society reflected the opinion of a growing number of Italians, like the philosopher and popular children’s author Ernesto Codignola (1885–1965), who believed that education was the “most powerful instrument of civilization” that formed “the spirit and mind of a people.” He further explained, “If school lies at the center of education, the national government must focus its most loving and assiduous efforts on liberating [the school] from the complex of impediments that have deformed it and made it inhuman.”13 This call for educational reform in Italy had first found a considerable following at the turn of the century, echoing the movements in other western European countries and the United States. Children were no longer viewed simply as small adults; medical professionals, teachers, and welfare activists determined that children had different ways of thinking, learning, and developing from those of adults.14 This perspective gave rise to a new orthodoxy about how educators should approach their relationship with young children: progressive educationalists (also known as educational idealists) viewed the traditional reliance on repetition and memorization as inadequate and conducted numerous studies showing the positive impact of experiential learning—lessons incorporating the skills of observation and creative thinking. Such an emphasis on connecting students to the environment and people immediately around them would be crucial to Gentile’s pedagogy under Fascism and, while not necessarily racial in intent, was fitting for a Fascist regime that wished to forge unbreakable bonds between Italy’s children and their so-called racial community.
The expansion of public health initiatives throughout western Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century also influenced the early Fascist reformers and the regime’s evolving biopolitical discourse. The twin realizations that educating the public about personal hygiene could reduce the spread of disease and that exposing the body to exercise and fresh air would strengthen the individual and lessen the likelihood of some infections drove public officials to promote outdoor learning, physical education, and “active” lessons in public schools. Educators, too, argued that students should develop their intellect not simply with facts and figures but also with an intimate understanding of physical fitness and discipline. Early twentieth-century doctors and educators resurrected the ancient Roman belief in mens sana in corpore sano—a healthy mind in a healthy body—and the aspiration to mold physically healthy young citizens fed directly into the more general goal of these educationalists to produce “fit” members of the larger society.15
Scholars have written much on the growth of educational and health movements in Germany, Great Britain, France, and the United States at the start of the twentieth century; seldom do these studies mention the Italian case.16 However, Italy was no exception to the international trends, and numerous Italian pedagogues contributed significantly to the broader Western movements.17 Furthermore, Gentile’s early work to transform the educational system to adhere to Fascist ambitions did not change the nation’s participation in the international discussion about pedagogy.18 Italian representatives continued to play an active role in conferences and symposia on education and child rearing, and many of the projects and proposals started under the Liberal government as far back as the late nineteenth century continued to find support after 1922.19 According to historian Adrian Lyttelton, Mussolini’s decision to appoint Gentile as his first minister of public instruction was largely influenced by the philosopher’s international renown and therefore potential to increase support for Fascism abroad through his redevelopment of the educational system based on popular Western pedagogical trends.20
Gentile’s contributions to the development of a Fascist educational framework were not limited to his reputation as a respected Western pedagogue and philosopher, however. Gentile’s theories on the social nature of humans and the formation of their collective identity meshed nicely with Fascism’s emphasis on the collective over the individual.21 Additionally, the weakened position of the Italian nation-state after the Great War further convinced Gentile of the need for change through the implementation of a new, “ethical state.”22 Such an ethical state—as the political manifestation of the nation—would have an obligation not to be objective or “agnostic”; rather, its primary responsibility would lie in training Italy’s citizens to realize their own strength and, through it, the strength of the nation.23 This concept would be particularly helpful in Mussolini’s campaign to strengthen the race, even if Gentile’s primary concern was a national community not necessarily tethered to a racial identity.24 Likewise, Mussolini’s invitation to design the future of Italian education provided Gentile with the opportunity to enact some of the changes to Italian society he had advocated since the turn of the century. Still, by the second half of the 1920s Gentile had thoroughly wedded himself to the Fascist regime and its supposed continuation of the Risorgimento. With the 1929 publication of his Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, Gentile did his part to define the goals of the Fascist project and argue for the historic necessity of Mussolini’s regime.25 Gentile might have begun his career in the MPI as an independent pedagogue, but by the end of the decade, he was Fascism’s ideological spokesperson.
In his capacity as minister of public instruction, Gentile was in charge of all levels of public education, but he agreed with the Duce that mandatory primary education was one of the most effective means with which the ethical state could implant communal values and beliefs.26 Because of the impressionable age of the pupils and the powerful role of primary school teachers as surrogate parents, Gentile and other pedagogues held that “teachers truly are the most noble, patient, and effective propagandists of our civilization.”27 The editor-in-chief of the Annals of Elementary Education (Annali dell’istruzione elementare), Emilio Bodrero, expressed such a conviction in the journal’s 1928 inaugural edition, writing that “almost six million children are entrusted to the care of teachers who must create in them the religious, civil, and national consciousness that will make them knowledgeable citizens and modern Italians.” The editor continued, “In primary school, in fact, the citizen receives his first training, which, in order to stay with him for his entire life, must be so effective that nothing would be worth erasing it.”28 In short, the primary-education experience was to imbue Italian youth with the values and characteristics that would lead Italy to a glorious, united future.29 Early education was the perfect venue, and the elementary school teacher was the best purveyor of Fascist ideals, racial and otherwise. Many of the changes to the primary-education system and curriculum of the 1920s were made in order to develop a stronger impression of these ideals on the minds of the youngest Italians.
To head up the reforms specific to elementary education, Gentile appointed his longtime friend and intellectual partner Giuseppe Lombardo Radice (1879–1938) to the new position of director general of primary education.30 While Gentile focused the majority of his attention on the reform of secondary and university education, Lombardo Radice played a leading role in the formation of Fascist elementary pedagogy between 1922 and 1924.31 This first director general of primary education was another Sicilian-born educational idealist of the time who, like Gentile, made his first journey north at the age of eighteen to study at the Scuola normale. Enrolling in 1896, Lombardo Radice’s time at the institution overlapped briefly with Gentile and initiated a friendship that would last more than three decades.32 Together the two intellectuals—along with Croce, Codignola, and others—formed an intellectual circle that engaged in numerous discussions and debates over the state of Italian education and culture in the early twentieth century. Lombardo Radice shared much of Gentile’s interpretation of Hegelian dialectics and, perhaps even more than Gentile, argued against the predominance of positivist curricula in Italian schools; he most notably promoted the didactic importance of local culture and personal experience in elementary education.33 As their mutual friend and colleague Armando Carlini would later write, “[Lombardo Radice] was not a pedagogical philosopher as Gentile was: he was a pedagogical educator, and the greatest one that we had in Italy during his time.”34 Lombardo Radice’s work primarily focused on integrating “spiritual” education and genuine enthusiasm for learning into nursery and elementary education, as will be evident in the reforms delineated in the following pages.35 And despite his initial trepidation regarding the Fascist ascension to power, Lombardo Radice was eventually convinced to join the initial Fascist educational regime in what he liked to consider a didactic, rather than political, position.36
Together, Gentile and Lombardo Radice and other educational reformers embraced the challenge to create an educational system to reform the Italian mind and spirit. The reforms that resulted, known popularly as the 1923 Gentile Reform, provided a framework forged in Western educational idealism but quite adaptable to the evolving rhetoric and needs of Mussolini’s racial ideology.
In bureaucratic terms, Gentile’s 1923 reforms attempted to restructure the MPI, which most Italian pedagogues and politicians agreed was in a state of institutional crisis. The bureaucracy was largely corrupt, its finances lay in ruins, and the school infrastructure was in desperate need of repair. The High Council for Public Instruction (Consiglio superiore della istruzione pubblica), which consisted of thirty-six academics chosen through a combination of ministerial appointment and election, rarely represented the significant diversity of regional needs. Shackled by limited resources and rampant corruption, the MPI had largely resisted reform since its mid-nineteenth-century inception. Gentile’s modifications to this system began by placing the authority to appoint delegates to this high council exclusively with the king. This change helped ensure that bureaucrats whose loyalty and priorities were defined first and foremost by the Fascist government dominated the ministerial decision-making process.37
More than that, the 1923 Gentile Reform required all children to attend school between the ages of six and fourteen—raising the mandatory school age by two years—and enforced the greater standardization of the curricula in both public and private schools.38 To do so, new laws organized the public schools by region rather than province, allowing greater state control over the network.39 They also increased the scope of elementary schools from three grades to five, dividing the extended age range into two phases: grades 1 through 3 (grado inferiore), for children approximately six to nine years old, and grades 4 and 5 (grado superiore), for students approximately nine to eleven years old.40 At the end of each school year, students were required to take a state exam in order to advance to the next class. These two stages of primary education generally catered to children between the ages of six and eleven, but since students advanced to the next grade or remained another year in the same grade depending on their annual performance, it was not unusual to have twelve-, thirteen-, or even fourteen-year-olds in a fifth-grade class.41
After fifth grade, each student could continue a classical education in the liberal arts and sciences if he or she passed the mandated state exam. If he or she did not pass that exam, the student was to attend one of any number of vocational schools for professional training or a junior high school that would serve as the end of the individual’s education. Such options allowed students who did not advance to a classical middle school to gain a practical education in a future trade.42 Despite Gentile’s aims and efforts, however, historian Elena D’Ambrosio has pointed out that in the 1920s three out of four Italian students finished their formal education at the elementary level, again highlighting the immense importance of primary education in the Fascist project to strengthen the Italian race.43
This standardized educational infrastructure did not mean that the new administration abandoned specialized policies and curricula for discrete demographics, and Gentile’s ministry was particularly aware of the distinct needs of Italy’s rural communities.44 An Italian rural education movement had already begun in earnest in the early 1900s, particularly with Alessandro Marcucci’s 1905 founding of the Schools for the Peasants of the Agro Romano and the Pontine Swamps (Le scuole per i contadini dell’Agro Romano e delle Paludi Pontine). This organization worked for the “cultural reclamation” (bonifica culturale umana) of the people who lived in the countryside of Lazio just outside Rome, and it would continue to do so during the first years of Fascist rule.45 Marcucci’s project illustrated Italy’s long tradition of the promotion of rural education through private or government-associated (parastatale) organizations. Such a variegated system required fewer financial commitments from a relatively poor state but also resulted in both an irregular establishment of schools throughout the nation and limited oversight of the schools that the MPI did not directly run.46
The rural education campaign took on a sense of urgency under Gentile’s leadership of the MPI and with Mussolini’s determination to enact bonifica umana throughout the nation. The combination of an increased concern for maintaining “demographic strength”—that is, increasing the national birthrates through an active pronatalist campaign—and evidence that the Italian rural populations produced considerably more children than their urban counterparts meant that the rural populations were to be exalted and protected portions of the Italian race.47 At the same time, a sizeable proportion of Italy’s peasant population was still illiterate in 1919—something public officials saw as a mark of national (but not racial) inferiority.48 According to D’Ambrosio, even in 1921, 25 percent of Italy’s male population and 31 percent of its female population between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-nine could not read.49 Rural schools, above all, needed to teach their communities basic skills, because, as one government report stated, “illiteracy should not and cannot exist in a civilized nation, particularly with the directives and lofty goals indicated by the Fascist Revolution.”50 More importantly, rural education was an essential component of the spread of Fascist ideals for the Italian race: “The rural school represents the future generation that will know how to materialize all our hopes. Guided by the Duce, this generation will know how to reach the goals dreamed by those who fought and bled, crowned by glory and victory, in the trenches, seas, and skies.”51
Consequently, despite the eagerness of the new government to increase agricultural production—something that discouraged school attendance—the Fascist regime further invigorated and expanded the rural education movement with a number of institutional developments. First and foremost, the state took increasing control over the administration of the rural school system and placed all organizations working in rural education under the regulation of the state (consiglio di stato). It also combined classes in so-called unclassified elementary schools, increasing the number of establishments similar to the American one-room schoolhouse, where age diversity was a central component of the curriculum and methodology. Often there was one class for grades 1 through 3 and another class for grades 4 and 5, though many other rural schools only maintained the first three grades, after which children were expected to attend vocational schools for the remainder of their primary education. Students rarely made that transition, however, because they needed to help support the family but also because the vocational schools in many communities were never built.52
In tandem with the need for a dedicated rural education program, the MPI was markedly aware of the need for an appropriately gendered education system.53 Certainly the belief that girls needed an education that catered to their “unique” role in Italian society was not new; handbooks articulating the specifics of “girls’ education” were prevalent in the kingdom since unification. The obvious corollary to such a discourse was that the standard pedagogy was essentially designed for boys. Girls were the exception to the norm. It was the “standard” side of this constructed gender dichotomy that received increased attention after Mussolini came to power. Masculinizing the male population—and the concepts of nation and race—had been central to Fascist political rhetoric since the beginning of Mussolini’s movement, and pedagogical discussions of the 1920s mirrored such a campaign.54 In particular, fear that the public education system did not contain enough male teachers as role models for the male student population became a growing preoccupation for officials, pedagogues, and even parents.55 The situation was complicated by the fact that mothers were largely the ones who began and then continued their children’s education at home. Fathers were rarely available to oversee this portion of their children’s education and often participated only in what one article on child rearing considered “the most serious cases.”56 This arrangement did not diminish the father’s importance in Italian home life, but the Fascist administration had to grapple with the implications of having women at the forefront of early education.
Fascist officials further exacerbated the gender imbalance among elementary teachers with a law passed in December 1925 allowing for the forced retirement of any public officials who did not express Fascist sympathies. This measure led to a significant purging of educational administrators and elementary teachers in the kingdom in order to replace them with more faithful followers and transmitters of Fascist pedagogy, much as the Nazi regime would do shortly after coming to power in 1933.57 Since Mussolini subsequently had to decrease the pay for elementary teachers in order to afford the increase in school personnel that the expanded school system required, it was especially difficult to find men willing to enter the profession. Instead, more women—both single and married—came to fill the positions.58 Clearly, then, the initial Fascist adaptations to the educational infrastructure made for less than the regime’s ideal primary school system, but they would prove to be the launchpad for the expanding scope and reach of the Fascist state in the lives of Mussolini’s children.
More than establishing a new bureaucratic architecture, Gentile’s 1923 educational reforms defined the philosophy of Fascist education that would help mold new generations of the Italian race. Many of his most dramatic reform efforts concerned secondary, postsecondary, and professional education; still, the measures put forth for the improvement of primary education were significant and indicative of the role Fascists envisioned for the Italian youth in their campaign for bonifica umana.
On the one hand, the minister’s conception of education reform was rather egalitarian: he believed all students—regardless of background or ability—should have a standard, introductory education in the humanities, including art and literature, so that each child could access all parts of his or her “spirit.”59 Few children would ever have a chance to continue these studies after elementary school, and even fewer would find any practical use for such knowledge in their professional or home lives. Nevertheless, the educational idealist believed that such studies would help develop the richest parts of italianità, giving children the tools to realize their fullest potential as Italians at home and in society.
With similar purpose, Gentile announced that lessons in religion would become mandatory for all elementary school children. This reform was one of Gentile’s most striking and controversial changes to primary education for a number of reasons. Religious education had been stipulated in the 1859 Casati Law, the legal foundation of the modern Italian school system until the Gentile Reform.60 Implementation was hardly uniform, however, and the contentious political relationship between the Vatican and the unified Italian state had strained many of the cultural ties between the Catholic Church and the national government. By the end of the Great War, most religious education was limited to parochial schools and other church organizations. Gentile’s decision to integrate religious instruction into public education was also unexpected because he had been an adamant supporter of the separation of church and state, and Mussolini had been outwardly hostile toward religion until his rise to power.61 Not everyone embraced this decision, either; many educational idealists believed the inclusion of parochial instruction in any national education system was antithetical to the modern idea of public education for all.
In other ways, this aspect of his reforms signaled important characteristics of Gentile’s educational philosophy and Fascism’s political and cultural outlook. The minister of public instruction believed that understanding the principles of religion was a prerequisite for anyone to engage with philosophy; religion was, in his estimation, popular philosophy.62 In turn, to engage in life philosophically was the best method with which each individual could realize his or her personality to the fullest. Politically, this initiative can be seen as an essential building block in the long negotiations that ended in the 1929 Lateran Pacts.63 Most important to Fascist racial education, however, were the cultural reasons behind Gentile’s reform. The philosopher recognized the critical role the Catholic Church played within Italian culture and believed that students would be able to access and develop the most valuable traits of italianità in part by retrieving those found within Catholic culture. An Italian’s religious identity could not be separated from his or her national identity, Gentile argued: “Even our speech, our religion itself, which do indeed live in the human mind, may yet be considered as natural facts similar to the geographical accidents which give boundaries and elevation to the land of a people.”64 Beyond the specific tenets of Catholicism, instruction in religious observance taught Italians the principles of filial piety and, more generally, obedience to a higher power.65 These traits were essential to developing a Fascist conception of italianità—the subject of the next chapter—and Mussolini often took advantage of Catholic traditions to establish himself as the leader of a secular religion.66 The frequent public parades, songs, prayers, and other ceremonies gave Fascism a religious atmosphere that was both familiar and extremely appealing.67
The promotion of religion in primary education was illustrative of the overarching philosophy driving the reforms; it also highlighted the first of two pedagogical pillars essential to the framework of Fascist education, which this study terms organic learning. Fascist educators were encouraged to base their lesson plans on material with which their students were already familiar—the local environment, family traditions, community customs, and languages. This type of organic learning capitalized on the idea that students would be better able to connect with familiar concepts and to build on a preexisting knowledge base.68 As a result, early Fascist educational manuals presented curricular requirements as indicative rather than prescriptive; while the MPI wanted to keep the principal concepts uniform throughout the various regions, its leadership also encouraged teachers to use the conditions of their posts, their own experiences, and their own personalities to improve their lesson plans, especially in rural settings.69 As Ernesto Codignola—the turn-of-the-century children’s author and Gentile’s close philosophical colleague—explained in his 1925 book, The Difficulty of National Education in Italy, such a methodology relied on the belief that there should be no distance between the educator and the student. Instead, within education, “the teacher can appeal to himself, his intuition, his intelligence, his psychological effects: there are no presumptions, no norms, no laws.”70 Ultimately, this quote reflected the fact that during his time as minister of public instruction, Gentile was far more interested in training teachers in the essence of italianità than in pure dogma.71 In other words, students were to learn how to read, observe, think, and act like Italians and Fascists but not what those observations, thoughts, or actions should be in each moment of their lives. Certainly this philosophy exposed the changeable nature of Fascism, but it also led to one of the most significant effects of Gentile’s reforms: to elevate the role of the teacher in the lives of both the students and the nation-state.72 Furthermore, it urged the development of intense bonds between students and their community, a key component of the Fascist campaign to promote racial awareness among young Italians.
The second pedagogical pillar of the Gentile Reform, the principle of action over ideas, conformed largely to Liberal-era and Western educational trends but was presented as unique to Fascist doctrine (much like the phenomenon of Fascism itself). Italian pedagogues of the 1920s pushed the importance of observation and active learning so that students would become men and women of action. The language of the Gentile Reform encouraged students not to be passive observers of their own education but to develop their senses of spontaneity and creativity.73 Despite the aggressive, authoritarian nature of the Fascist movement, Gentile and his educational-idealist colleagues in the MPI did not want to inhibit the impulse to explore; the true educational goal in Gentile’s reforms was to create a new mentality in young students with which to carry forth their own investigations.74
As a whole, then, Gentile and Lombardo Radice envisioned this pedagogy as transforming the Italian youth into thoughtful, ambitious, proactive, and disciplined individuals who were tightly connected to the spiritual and social community around them. Such an aspiration, while not in and of itself racial, provided an approach with which the regime could promote the biopolitical discourses geared to elevate the racial identity of Italy’s children.
As the pedagogical principles of organic and active learning make clear, the new educational system relied on a holistic notion of education that embraced the mind, body, and spirit. A central piece of the implementation of this pedagogy, then, was to mandate the improvement of physical education programs throughout the national school system.75 In 1923 Gentile organized the National Organization for Physical Education (ENEF) to help train teachers to emphasize the importance of discipline and physical health through exercise (though it would be shut down four years later).76 The ENEF also established playgrounds and playing fields and collaborated with community athletic clubs to popularize physical fitness.77 A subsequent series of laws in 1924 then made physical education mandatory in all state schools for both boys and girls.
These initiatives took great inspiration from early twentieth-century trends in other European countries; likewise, the MPI was similarly motivated to expand its physical education reforms beyond the walls of public schools.78 Fascist officials and pedagogues were deeply concerned about the limitations of the classroom in terms of assuring the intellectual, physical, and moral education of Italy’s youngest members. One journalist of the period articulated these fears particularly well: “After school and in addition to school, the student continues his life as an evolving little being. But how will he live that life? The family is not always in the position to provide for his gradual and rational development; often it lacks the competency and even more often the means. It is here where the subsidiary and auxiliary scholastic institutions intervene, all of which, in a certain sense, are substitutes for the family to fill the gaps that elementary school necessarily leaves in the physical and spiritual education of the student.”79 In line with this position, the new Fascist government promoted a number of policies, programs, and organizations in the 1920s that would more directly control the extramural activities of their impressionable children.
Of greatest note in this campaign was the establishment of the ONB in April 1926.80 As with a growing number of extracurricular organizations throughout the West, such as the Boy and Girl Scouts of the United States and, later, the Hitler Youth in Germany, the ONB focused on developing “the physical and moral health of the Italian youth” between the ages of eight and eighteen with the goal of “preparing them for the new Italian way of life.”81 The regime named the ONB in honor of a Genovese boy, Giovan Battista Perasso, whose nickname, Balilla (originally a Ligurian term that referred to a lively boy), played a central role in Italian nationalist mythology.82 As a young patriot in 1746, the legend held, Balilla stood up against occupying Austrian Hapsburg troops in an attempt to start a revolution to free his city, Genoa, from foreign oppression. As a textbook later related, “Balilla, for however young he was, hated the domineering enemies of his fatherland, and one day in Genoa, many years ago . . . he threw a rock at those terrible foreign soldiers. So everyone followed his example and the citizens picked up their arms and threw the Austrians out of the city. The gesture of that young Genovese hero demonstrates that even kids can love and serve the fatherland.”83 The strength of both Balilla’s body and character had allowed him to stand against the foreign invaders and protect the honor of his fatherland. Such a story was to serve as a model for all Italians; it illustrated the ideal spiritual and physical aspects of the Fascist youth organization’s members and the Italian race more generally.84
A significant factor in the development of the ONB as a foundational institution in Fascist youth education was its leadership. Of course, as an organization of the national government, its ultimate leaders were King Vittorio Emanuele III and the Duce himself. However, Mussolini found an indispensable partner in Renato Ricci (1896–1956), who headed the organization until 1937. Like the other foundational members of the Fascist educational system, Ricci’s personal narrative elucidates certain characteristics of the Fascist project. Born in Carrara, a small coastal town in Tuscany known for its marble, Ricci became an early member of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s legionaries in 1919 and followed the original duce later that year in his quest to take Fiume for Italy.85 After the fall of D’Annunzio’s short-lived Italian Regency of Carnaro in late 1920, Ricci settled in as the Fascist leader of his hometown, where he gained a reputation as an enthusiastic and brutal ras during the days of the Fascist squads. In many ways, Ricci was a representative figure of the early Fascist movement: youthful, strong, and impulsive; Ricci was much more concerned with showing power through strength and force than through words and negotiation.86 Though these characteristics of Fascism had to be tempered once Mussolini came to power, they would remain inseparable from the image of the movement and regime. In this sense, the not overly bright but immensely ambitious young Ricci appeared to be the perfect spokesman for an organization designed to augment the physical and premilitary education of Italy’s children.87
While the physical education of Italy’s future soldiers was of immense value to the organization, the ONB became equally dedicated to the physical development of Italy’s female population. Indeed, the organization was intricately involved in the regime’s call for the “assistance and physical education for women in light of the fundamental need to prevent the decay of the razza and to strengthen it at the source.”88 In 1929 under the guidance of Angiola Moretti, the ONB founded the Piccole Italiane (ages eight to fourteen) and Giovani Italiane (ages fourteen to eighteen), which became the female equivalent of the boys’ Balilla and the Avanguardisti.89 As with the boys’ sections, the Piccole and Giovani Italiane created the extracurricular environment in which girls strengthened their bodies, established friendships, and learned the racial ideals of the new Fascist society; as the Balilla were trained to become the future soldiers of the fatherland, the Piccole Italiane were taught to be the future wives and mothers of the race. In other words, the creation of the Piccole Italiane aimed to carry out “the miracle of having a great number of women marching toward a common destination of improvement and well-being.”90
As was the case with most Fascist organizations at the outset, membership in the ONB was voluntary, though students were increasingly pressured to join as the years progressed, with the regime strengthening its hold on Italian society and more employers, schools, and government departments giving preference to its members. Because of the ONB’s ever-growing importance, its instructors went through a rigorous selection process. Only the most upstanding moral role models could participate in its leadership, and they were required to report to the central command of the organization twice a month for updated directives so that they could effectively carry out the mission of the Fascist Revolution.91 Beginning in 1927 the ONB held the annual Fascist “calling to the colors,” or leva fascista, on April 21, which the party considered the most important measuring stick of its progress toward rejuvenating the Italian race. At this highly orchestrated and pseudoreligious gathering that resembled Catholic confirmation, regiments of ONB members exhibited their strength and skills to local officials and community members in gymnastic competitions and parades. After these demonstrations, children matriculated to the next level of responsibility and honor: at the age of fourteen, boys who had been Balilla became the young men who formed the Avanguardisti, and girls who had composed the Piccole Italiane graduated to become Giovani Italiane. The ultimate promotion occurred at the age of eighteen when the organization’s eldest members, the Avanguardisti and Giovani Italiane, gained the privilege of membership in the PNF. Like its counterparts in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the ONB would be the source of the party’s most devoted members.92 This ceremony, sometimes referred to as “the surety of the future,” symbolized the increasing maturity and responsibility of the Italian youth and presented an image of the strength, virility, and fertility of the Italian race under Fascist leadership.93
Gentile believed that the concepts of organic and active learning were the best tools to enhance the Italian spirit, but he was highly aware that hygiene and health education could not be ignored in this expansive campaign for the physical, intellectual, and moral development of Italy’s children. The Italian public health movement had grown considerably around the turn of the century, but the rise of Fascism ensured its importance in the political and social infrastructure of the nation as a fundamental piece of its racial project. The regime institutionalized the idea of bonifica igenica (health reclamation), again giving words to the biopolitical trope of needing to “reclaim” the health of the Italian race. Already in 1922 the government illustrated the importance of public health education among children by giving the Junior Italian Red Cross (CRIG)—founded by the American Red Cross in the aftermath of World War I—a much more prominent position in the public school system.94 The purpose of the organization was, according to one journalist, to “discipline and coordinate the healthy impulses of the members to the greatest advantage of school and nation.”95 In these first years of the Fascist regime, membership numbers increased steadily, as the government encouraged entire classes to sign up. Group leaders trained students in basic hygiene and first aid and encouraged them to share the skills with friends and family. The organization produced a wide variety of materials with basic information on hygiene and health, including workbooks, posters, and pamphlets to distribute within schools.
The widespread establishment of open-air schools (scuole aperte) represented another aspect of the public health and physical education movements that contributed to the expanding racial campaign of the 1920s. The belief in the importance of frequent interaction with nature—extending the ideas of organic education and a return to the nation’s rural roots—led to the founding of numerous outdoor schools throughout Italy during the early Fascist period. Public health officials deemed these institutions particularly important to childhood development and racial purification: “The outdoor schools are one of the most effective prophylaxes against alcoholism, smoking, and immorality, since there is no tavern, no mud on the roads, and no foul language to corrupt in the countryside. . . . In the open air one begins to be a man, adapted to work hard, and to become strong so that he can honorably defend the nation if enemies threaten.”96 According to school officials, the lack of sunlight and air circulation often found in traditional classrooms had the potential to cause innumerable illnesses and contribute to others, including tuberculosis, alcoholism, and malnutrition.97 In response, the open-air schools were useful in “removing the children from the enclosed environment of the classroom and letting them breathe in the sunshine; this benefits not only those who are predisposed to hereditary and serious illnesses, but all the students, for whom fresh air and light cannot but help in their development.”98 In the mid-1920s most of Italy’s more populous communities rushed to establish outdoor classrooms for at least part of the year; and in many cases, the finest pedagogues were hired to develop the programs.99
Climate colonies (colonie climatiche) shared the goals of the open-air schools and were also first founded by the American Red Cross in 1919 but expanded considerably in the 1920s.100 Like all Fascist public health initiatives, these camps—established at beaches, in the mountains, and along rivers—were critical sites for bonifica umana, and officials saw the opportunity to attend one of these camps as essential to a child’s physical and moral (racial) education.101 Giuseppe Fanelli, a prominent children’s author of the time, wrote that “the advantages children derive from the camps and the colonies are not only physical, but also moral, since the communal life of the camps teaches them discipline, develops the sense of solidarity, and unites Italians from different regions. They [the children] can therefore better understand, engage themselves with, and love their shared nation.”102 While these camps targeted the “physical regeneration of the children who are less favored by nature,” they were generally open and free to those children from urban Italy who could not otherwise afford to go to the beach or the mountains.103 Oversight organizations hired doctors who were largely responsible for choosing who was accepted into these camps. They based their decision on several formal criteria that supposedly “transcended political or religious influences” but that primarily responded to subjective analyses.104 Over the course of the 1920s the number of children who attended such camps grew appreciably. In 1922 there were only 150 colonies in Italy, but by the summer of 1927 there were 1,200, with approximately 170,000 children attending them.105 The regime clearly saw these camps as an essential part of its campaign to create young Italians who could see to the success of the Fascist Revolution and the rejuvenation of the Italian race.
The number of public health institutions continued to expand over the course of the 1920s, the most critical of which was the 1925 launch of the ONMI under the control of the Ministry of Health and with Italy’s Queen Elena named honorary president.106 One 1924 government document articulated particularly well the urgency of founding such an organization: “The protection of mothers and children represents one of the highest and most urgent priorities of our national life, an essential element of its defense, conservation, and progress. Youth truly constitutes our future society, and every action taken toward protecting their integrity and promoting physical, moral, and intellectual development is generally directed toward preserving the new generations from the influences of degenerative factors and preparing the progressive forms of social life.”107
The Fascist concentration on the collective, as opposed to the individual, contributed to the idea that the state should not improve the healthy population at the expense of any unhealthy members of society.108 Consequently, the goal of the ONMI was to strengthen the demographics of the nation both quantitatively and qualitatively, and to redeem the most vital elements of the entire Italian race. Though this early position—that the state needed to reclaim the health of all Italians—was in stark contrast to the Nazi concept of racial health in the next decade, the ONMI similarly argued that its measures were essential for “the health and physical improvement of the razza, and therefore one of the elements of strength and power of the State.”109 The programs that the ONMI organized and oversaw extended into many areas of Fascist life, but the majority of them addressed issues of education and child rearing. The program for a conference organized by the National Congress of Italian Women (CNDI) in 1923 explained that because the family was the first educator of the Fascist child, the regime was obligated to train men and women in Fascist values so that they could pass them on to their children from the very first days of life.110 The ONMI played a leading role in organizing nursery schools, climate colonies, and medical conferences. In addition, it instituted a system of rural ambulatory clinics, whose mission mirrored that of the organization at large: to teach peasants about childcare, health, and hygiene; to administer medication; and to help with prenatal care.111 These clinics helped to cut down on mortality rates, and in 1929 officials established programs in twelve national universities to train doctors and medical assistants in the requisite skills to establish and run increasing numbers of them.112 All the services that provided for the health of women and children were—in the words of Attilio Lo Monaco-Aprile, the ONMI’s first president—“necessary elements of, and therefore inseparable from, the unified and totalitarian project that has, as its ultimate goal, the defense and physical and moral improvement of the razza.”113
Notwithstanding the pedagogical emphasis on organic and active learning and the logistical variations between rural and urban schools, the effort to create generic textbooks played an essential role in developing a national Fascist elementary curriculum. But while the 1923 Gentile Reform articulated the new institutional and pedagogical foundations of the Italian elementary education, teachers in these early years continued to use many textbooks from the pre-Fascist period.114 This reality certainly pointed to the limitations of Fascist efforts to transform the education system quickly and fully, but it also performed a valuable service for the new administration. The majority of the material in these textbooks came in the form of passages and quotations from famous Italian heroes and authors, which bolstered Lombardo Radice’s strong support for providing students with lessons from the most respected Italians of the past and present. Such specialists and celebrities could inspire in young students the passion and curiosity for subjects that were essential to Lombardo Radice’s conception of education. Moreover, this format lent legitimacy to the nascent Fascist project: national experts and historical texts could provide clear evidence that Fascist ideals were inherently Italian ideals.
Nevertheless, the new administration was certain that pre-Fascist texts could be improved to further define and strengthen italianità. Under the Gentile Reform, and through the initiatives of Lombardo Radice, the MPI instituted a semiannual commission to review all existing public school textbooks and select those that were acceptable for the coming year.115 The primary school committee, chosen by the minister of public instruction, read through hundreds of texts submitted by authors from all over the nation. In 1926, for example, out of 1,326 entries, the committee approved 949 texts for classrooms and 100 more for school and town libraries, denying state approval to 277 books.116 The assignment was presented to Italian children’s authors as a competition, requiring the publishers to submit several copies of the texts along with a fee. The committee then published their selections in the summer editions of the ministry’s Official Bulletin (Bolletino ufficiale), and in 1925 the committee started printing small explanations of why they chose each book, in the hopes that such descriptions would guide authors in the right direction for upcoming years.117
The requirements for selection grew more restrictive as a result of the government’s clearer understanding of its own mission, and the MPI began complaining about the difficulty of finding appropriate elementary textbooks. The commission argued that this difficulty resulted in large part from the substantial time involved in reviewing all the submitted texts.118 Such a task needed to be handled with patience and care, Arrigo Solmi, a contemporary historian and Fascist official, explained, because the educational and cultural worth of elementary school largely depended on the quality of the textbooks, and the undertaking was made infinitely more challenging with such a great number of submissions. He believed that many of the proposals were written out of more commercial interest than educational concern—selection was certainly critical to the livelihood of these publishers—leading to a sizeable number of them being inappropriate for the new system and the elevated purpose of elementary education. Solmi concluded that the government needed to play a more significant role in designing the texts, and the content of the books needed to reflect the ideals of the New Italy, which were coming more clearly into focus.119
Partly as a result of such critiques, a royal decree on March 18, 1928, stated, “History, geography, literature, economics and law textbooks for elementary schools and for vocational schools must respond, in the spirit of the current curricula, to the historical, political, legal, and economic demands established from October 28 [1922] on.”120 This vague proclamation encouraged the ministry to become increasingly stringent in its textual requirements but gave authors few specific guidelines to inspire their writing. Authors submitted a dramatically larger number of new publications in 1927, 1928, and 1929; correspondingly, the commission approved fewer and fewer books.121 This fact pointed less to the lack of Fascist sentiment among some children’s authors—though that may well have been the case—than to the persistent imprecision of the ideals of the New Italy. The criteria of what made a textbook properly Fascist appeared to be much like the U.S. Supreme Court’s Justice Potter Steward’s 1964 definition of pornography: the commission would know it when it saw it.
The approved texts of the late 1920s did contain more overtly nationalistic and Fascist rhetoric.122 Nevertheless, later in 1928 the commission published a report that explained that less than half of the books presented to them had been appropriate for Fascist schools; it also included a list of texts that authors or editors needed to reexamine or amend.123 Then, in 1929, the MPI began to deny the approval of texts by foreign authors, because students were supposedly not graduating from school with enough of a “Fascist spirit.”124 The Fascist state believed in the tremendous importance of textbooks in the formation of a more uniform, widespread sense of italianità among the youngest Italians and sought to define those racial ideas ever more clearly over the course of the 1920s. The debate over textbooks seemingly ended in the 1928 demand for nationalized textbooks to begin production in 1930.
The Fascist government of the 1920s presented the 1923 Gentile Reform as illustrative of the goals of the state and the mission of the education system. Pietro Fedele, the minister of public instruction from 1925 to 1928, explained that “Fascism was and is, in all respects, a conscious, documented reevaluation . . . of the essential virtues of the Italian stirpe: and the Gentile Reform is eminently Fascist because, inserted in this work of rehabilitation, it proposes to the Italian youth . . . the goals of education and culture that are identified in our thousand-year-old and eternal civilization.”125 The authors of the 1923 reforms—Giovanni Gentile as well as Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, Ernesto Codignola, and others—conceived of education as a means to form the spirit of the Italian youth.126 This characterization of the reforms relied heavily on the vague and mutable meaning of Fascism at this early date, illustrating the struggles the government faced in formulating its own identity during these years. Ultimately, however, they created the institutional and pedagogical framework that would train Italian children according to a distinctly Fascist elaboration of the Italian race.
Gentile’s policies almost immediately elicited harsh criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. On the one hand, some of Gentile’s closest colleagues balked at the philosopher’s increasingly close relationship with Mussolini and his vision for the nation-state; many of those philosophers and pedagogues who had seen the rise of Fascism as an opportunity to shape the new educational system in their own image abandoned the ministry, especially in the wake of the 1924 Matteotti Crisis. Croce, who would become one of the most famous anti-Fascist intellectuals, quickly distanced himself from his former partner after Gentile’s rise to political prominence. Additionally, by the end of 1924, Lombardo Radice, who had never hidden his concerns about the new political environment from his good friend Gentile, left the realm of national education policy amid debates about the role of politics in elementary education and the future of democratic politics in Italy.127 While he and Gentile would maintain a cordial relationship, their collaboration and friendship appear never to have resumed the same intimacy. Just as Mussolini abandoned—or lost—the support of more-moderate political reformers as he gained confidence in his New Italy, Gentile, too, would choose to support the more uncompromising position of the regime at the expense of many intellectual friendships.128
At the same time, Mussolini’s more precise vision of his mission, as well as pressure from more-intransigent Fascists who believed that Gentile’s pedagogy was not nearly political enough in intent or content, ultimately overwhelmed many of the reforms’ original intentions. By the end of the 1920s Gentile himself would be long gone from the offices of the MPI, as the alterations to the 1923 reforms multiplied and the party and regime became clearer in their purpose and more confident in their power. The more authoritarian members of the regime could not and did not immediately dismiss the principles of Gentile’s reforms, however. His reforms contributed significantly to the centralization of the school system, and the institutions founded in the 1920s would remain critical for the regime’s efforts to rejuvenate the Italian race throughout the 1930s. Furthermore, Gentile and his colleagues had instituted the methodological approach to elementary education that would remain central to Italian pedagogy well into the next decade and, in many ways, beyond the Fascist period.129 Ultimately, the early efforts of Gentile, Lombardo Radice, Ricci, and others would prove an essential foundation from which to prepare the race for its supposedly predestined role as ruler of a renewed Roman Empire.