SOURCE: “Gentile's Educational Theory: A Revaluation,” in Italian Quarterly, Vol. XVIII, No. 70, Fall, 1974, pp. 20-36.

[In the following essay, Caserta posits that Gentile's educational theories were based in spiritualism and argues that they continue to be relevant.]

The educational theory of Giovanni Gentile¹ was born of a strong faith in man and felt with the force of a religion, a mission aiming to accomplish the regeneration of the Italian people and of the whole of mankind. School was thought to be a sacred temple where souls are made, the entire world a place of soul-making. The teacher, in fact, was often exhorted to become the new apostle, the missionary of a new religion, the religion of the Spirit. It is commonplace to recognize in Gentile's ideological program the continuation of the spirit that animated the Italian Risorgimento, the patriotic apostolate of Mazzini: “pensiero e azione,” but the broader scope of his pedagogical theory must not be lost along with what has been relegated to history. A forceful reaffirmation of the essentially spiritual nature of the educational process is no less urgent today than in Gentile's time. What can we learn from Gentile's educational theory? What should we modify or reject?

The intellectual climate in which Gentile matured and which together with Croce he energetically opposed as a thinker and as an educator was, like ours today, dominated by a materialistic philosophy. The Positivism of Comte, Spencer, and Ardigò, like any form of philosophical materialism, considered being, as independent of knowing, as a necessary presupposition of knowing; and theories of learning were in general founded on the belief that reality is an abstraction of thought, that we must conform to reality through thought.

The antithesis between materialism and Neo-idealism² provides the basis for a contrast between positivistic education and the educational theory advocated by Gentile. According to the materialistic view, education is communication of knowledge already existing; for Gentile instead it is the generation of knowledge, the formation of man, the generation of oneself. Since, in the view of Gentile, man is Spirit, education should form and develop the Spirit in a continuous process from birth to death. According to Gentile, man can never say: “Behold, I am formed!” Man's educational growth is a never ceasing process, not an accumulation of facts; it is the conquest of a clearer and deeper self-awareness.

Materialism, postulating reality outside the mind, considers the mind void, a tabula rasa, and everything needed by the mind must come from the outside. Schools exist because there is a body of facts to be taught, facts which are catalogued in libraries, museums, galleries, and manuals and must be transmitted from generation to generation.

Since the whole consists of parts, the pile of facts must be subdivided and classified, just as in nature. The easy things must be taught first, the more difficult ones later; first the particular, then the universal; first the simple things and later the complex. Things exist in time and space and are many, so they are placed in the Procustian bed, mutilated, adjusted to the mental capacities of each pupil.

Learning so empirically understood was, according to Gentile, the very negation of knowledge, because the accumulation of facts, or erudition, is not susceptible to development but only to mere increase in quantity. “Reading one book or an entire library—Gentile stated—is the same thing if what we read does not become our life.”³ Gentile believed that learning follows the law and process of the Spirit, which is one, eternally active and creative, and that learning therefore must be one, formative and creative: “aim at unity, look always at life, which is the person, the soul where it is necessary to penetrate with love in order to create a new world.”⁴ The materialistic conception of man and of education, on the contrary, “extinguishes in man the feeling of his freedom, depresses the personality, suffocates the vivid awareness of spirituality in the world.”⁵ Materialism was seen to be at the very root of the agnosticism, the skepticism, indifference, and nausea that Gentile and Croce, heirs to the humanistic and idealistic conception of man, aimed to conquer.

No wonder pedagogy is identified by Gentile with philosophy, with his Actual Idealism; it originated from the same ideological vision and program: to revalue the Spirit over matter, to build souls as Christianity had done especially in early times, to make men masters of themselves and of the universe, to make Italians once Italy had been made.

School reform was, according to Gentile, of vital importance if a spiritual revival was to take place in Italy. He prepared the terrain by collaborating with Croce on the review La Critica⁶ whose main aim was to modernize and to revitalize Italian culture, to inculcate a new intellectual faith which would fill the void left by the Catholic Church, discredited by the government after the capture of Rome in 1870. Croce, on account of his literary preferences, concentrated mostly on the formulation of an aesthetic theory which, by defining art as lyric expression, would demand of the artist originality and human feeling and of the critic not the mechanical application of extrinsic rules and criteria but, essentially, that he be an educated and sensitive reader. Gentile carried out in philosophy stricto sensu and in education the same process of revision that Croce was effecting in aesthetics and literary criticism. The objectives were identical until 1925, when on account of their political differences the two men followed divergent paths.

In his first writings on education, Gentile's thought is already clearly defined. He states that “education is formation of man according to his concept.”⁷ The goals of education have been determined by the concept of man which prevails in each historical period. Hence the differences in educational programs and goals between Athens and Sparta, Greece and Rome, between the Classical world and the Christian, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, before and after the French Revolution.⁸ The concept of man which prevailed in the second half of the nineteenth century was naturalistic: man was subdivided into body, soul, and mind; consequently the threefold subdivision of education into physical, moral, and intellectual.

Since for Gentile man is Spirit and only Spirit, education should be “the science of the formation of the Spirit.”⁹ The Spirit is essentially history, free and autonomous development, and so education must aim at the free development of the Spirit in the individual and in society. Both man and society, according to Gentile, make themselves what they are, and they are what their culture is, culture being the very life of our Spirit. Since the Spirit is one, free, and indivisible, the dualism between teacher and pupil disappears. Not on one side the teacher with his knowledge, on the other the pupil with his ignorance: two separate entities in conflict, one trying to subdue the other. Not on one side school and on the other society, one different from the other, the former seen as a preparation for the latter, but unity, harmony of souls engaged in a common effort to educate each other. The Spirit unites men, says Gentile, so education is mainly unification, an intersubjective process in which liberty and authority are not antithetic terms, but two dialectic moments which determine the process and the realization of the Spirit in its internal rationality, in its continuous becoming.

The teacher's voice should live in the pupil's soul and the pupil's soul in that of the teacher. Teaching is regarded as a process of synthesis: the teacher by educating becomes more and more an educator, the educand becomes more and more self-educated. Discipline and authority are for Gentile a question inherent to the educational process, while content and subject matter are not considered to be enclosed in texts and manuals, but intrinsic to the formative spiritual process of the educand.¹⁰

All the traditional questions concerning subject matter and methodology become secondary and unimportant for Gentile. The teacher should aim at forming the pupil's personality, he should make him first a man and then a specialist in whatever field he chooses. Even gymnastics is considered by Gentile to be a part of spiritual education, since our bodies, nature, and even the world are real only in the Spirit. However, since the life of the Spirit evolves in a dialectic triad of art, religion, and philosophy, these three spiritual activities ought to be stressed and cultivated above all others. In fact, in the Gentile Reform passed in 1923, these subjects became the core curriculum of both the elementary and the secondary school.

The religious schools were felt by Gentile to be inadequate, because, being inspired by different religious beliefs, they mutually excluded one another, while school by its very nature unites men and souls, freeing them from prejudices and selfish views and interests, lifting them up into the pure air of science and universal goodness. The religious schools on the contrary, Gentile noted, will substitute for the individual pre-school differences others which, being inculcated more systematically, will be very hard to erase in later years: they destroy the innate faith in the unity of truth and goodness, and before the eyes of the students divide humanity into two kinds: the chosen and the wicked, the former englightened by truth and justice, the latter condemned to darkness, searching in vain for a ray of light.¹¹ Hence the intolerance, the dogmatism, the division among men instead of unity and brotherhood.

Another great handicap of the religious schools, according to Gentile, is their tendency to deprive the Spirit of its domain and consequently the individual of his moral and intellectual responsibility by educating man to resignation, to passively awaiting what he can only attain through his own strength and efforts. For this reason the religious schools also tend to be reactionary, antidemocratic and therefore anti-educational while education by definition is free and should aim to make free men.

On the other hand, religious schools have certain positive aspects lacking in the lay schools: they inculcate in the souls of the pupils a faith which becomes the center of their conduct, and, possessing a clear concept of the goal of the Spirit, they are able to direct all their efforts towards the attainment of that goal. Gentile's solution was to transfer this very quality of the religious school to the lay school. School must be one, because the Spirit is one, but school must be inspired by a faith, “because man does not move like a stone or a beast, but with a mind that reasons and wants.”¹²

The Italian national school system that Gentile criticized and wanted to alter not only did not teach in a formal manner any religion, but it had no unified vision and aspiration. For Gentile a neutral school is not a school; it creates indifference and skepticism. Likewise, teachers who do not have a faith cannot give one; they cannot form men if they themselves are not men; they cannot stimulate interest if they themselves have none. According to Gentile a faith is indispensable in school because morality requires a general vision of the world and such a vision is provided either by religion or by philosophy.

Since in the idealism of Gentile religion as well as art are two imperfect forms of the dialectic triad, philosophy must provide such vision for the individual and for society. Teaching philosophy to children, on account of their immaturity, would be of no benefit, so religion should take the place of philosophy in the early years: “Where philosophy does not or cannot enter—says Gentile—there religion must enter with its easy and arbitrary solutions, otherwise every deep moral conviction, every true sense of humanity will flee.”¹³ Religion should be taught in the elementary schools, while in the secondary schools that initium sapientiae given by religion should be continued and enlightened with history and philosophy. Religion in fact was not only introduced, but made compulsory in the elementary schools after the Gentile Reform was passed.¹⁴ The philosophy that was to succeed the teaching of religion was, it goes without saying, Actual Idealism. Shortly we shall demonstrate that the defects implicit in Actual Idealism are the very defects of Gentile's educational theory, which, if imposed on an entire nation by a totalitarian regime like the Fascist dictatorship of Mussolini, produces catastrophic consequences not only for single individuals but for the whole nation.

The most delicate aspect of Gentile's educational theory, in fact, lies in the relationship between liberty and authority, pupil and teacher, individual and state. On one hand, the schools should promote the creative activity of the Spirit, which does not presuppose anything; they should form free men, alert and fecund souls. On the other, since the school curriculum is defined in accordance with the a priori logic of Actual Idealism and imposed dogmatically on the students without any choice, a single curriculum with very little variation is forced on the entire nation, and teachers, instead of forming free men, become petty tyrants who carry out an educational program divised by an elite group resident in the capital under the direct supervision and control of the head of state.

The absolute moral authority of the teacher, which Gentile so strongly advocated and wanted to identify with the freedom of the pupils in a dialectic process, in practice totally destroys the liberty of the pupils, who are entirely at the teacher's mercy. The teacher becomes the law itself, before which the student dares not open his mouth. He may only applaud and humbly hope to receive the grace of a passing grade, after being called donkey several times.

Even before he became the philosopher of Fascism and his educational Reform the most Fascist of reforms, as Mussolini used to say, Gentile, in his Sommario di pedagogia, stressed discipline as the essential condition of school, as the duty of the teacher, and defined authority as unity of law and will, and will as unity of force and love. Corporal punishment was recommended because, according to Gentile, the body is an abstraction, it is spirit, and by punishing the body, we educate the Spirit: to give punishment is both the duty of the teacher and the right of the student. “It is the future man—Gentile states—who asks of the educator the punishment which will redeem him.”¹⁵ If the Spirit is development, a continuous fieri, one may ask: How can the teacher predict what the future man will be? How is the pupil going to feel later on about those punishments, especially when they were not deserved and were administered by teachers who were not filled with love? And what about the rights of the individual? Freedom, which should characterize teaching and school, becomes in practice an abstraction; school is reduced to a military academy or worse to a prison where pupils do not develop a vital and critical mind and do not mature into citizens with their own minds, but rather become products bearing the seal of the state.

These practical consequences of Gentile's educational theory are historically true and therefore not exaggerated. However, in order to be fair to Gentile, it must be added that his educational theory is the sincere expression of a man dominated by a strong faith in human capacity and goodness and who was himself an excellent educator.

Following the Hegelian political philosophy, Gentile distinguishes between the empirical ego and the transcendent Ego, identifying the former with the individual and the latter with the nation, the state in which the individual is resolved and finds his concrete reality. The state is defined as the common and universal will. Such identification of state and conscience tends to annual individual freedom and responsibility, reducing the conscience of the individual to a satellite deprived of its own light and forced to run around in harmony with the state, which is the ethical incarnation of the self-awareness, the central will and act which moves everything and around which everything must move.

Education becomes the most vital function of Gentile's ethical state: it is national awareness. The pupil must be educated not in order to fulfill himself, but in order to nourish the life of the state, which is the only reality and for which the individual is instrumental. From such a distorted definition of the relationship between man and state and his function derives a distorted view of the function of education. Everything—art, morality, religion, and science—is reduced to politics. Education becomes nationalistic: art must express national feelings and characteristics, morality becomes immanent in the life of the state, which, being the national conscience, dictates to the individual what he must do. Religion too is an instrument of the state, as Machiavelli affirmed in his Prince. Science will be used to strengthen the national might. And philosophy finds its reality only in the state; it is immanent in the politics of the state to the point that Actual Idealism and Fascism became the same thing, and Gentile the philosopher of Fascism.

The coherence of the theory of Actual Idealism and the dialectics of the opposites led Gentile to consider war a necessary phase of the development of the Spirit: war is the alterity which must be conquered and overcome. War does not derive, according to Gentile, from a desire for solitude, but from love, from the desire to overcome dissent. On the other hand, since many sovereign states exist, war becomes unavoidable and only the most powerful ones, following the logic of such a political ideology, will prevail by subduing the weaker ones.

The educational and political theories of Gentile have been proved deficient in a tangible manner by the last catastrophic world war and even theoretically reveal themselves to be contradictory because if they eliminate within the state the bellum omnium contra omnes among individuals, they leave open the bellum nationum contra omnes nationes, which is far more dangerous than the personal conflicts and disputes within the individual states and means today the total annihilation of humanity.

The weakness of Gentile's educational theory lies in his defective philosophical premises: first, the identification of the theoretical and the practical functions of the mind leads to a sort of vitalism and irrationalism in which no dialogue is permitted among men, since they don't act according to their free will, but according to the active Spirit personified in the conscience of the state. They are not supposed to think: others think for them. Therefore, rather than searching for knowledge and truth, they find knowledge already prefabricated outside and they are made to swallow it by force so that they will become docile subjects, deprived of their soul and initiative, a herd moved by a capricious shepherd.

The theoretical and the practical functions of the Spirit must be distinct although not separate, as Croce rightly affirms, because in terms of Actual Idealism it is impossible to differentiate between a good action and a bad one, between a right thought and a wrong one. Thought is identical to action, and consequently we would have a series of actions completely unintelligible, each one complete in itself, self-sufficient and self-explanatory, a plurality of unrelated monads on which it would be impossible to pass judgment. Nor would it be possible to distinguish what is poetic from what is rhetorical, what is done for selfish motives from what is done in order to achieve a higher level of humanity.

The function of the state should be restricted to the promotion and the supervision of the economic welfare of the citizens, without any infringement on personal liberty and rights: the state should exist for the people and not above the people; otherwise the democratic education of Athens yields to the militaristic discipline of Sparta, the teaching of Socrates yields to that of Hitler.

In the philosophical system of Gentile the person is reduced to a fictio imaginationis, an abstraction. There is a confusion between person and personality. One cannot form a personality (the Spirit) unless he keeps in mind the person, the individual, mind and body, which are very real. The main purpose of education is to form the individual, the person in his social and historical world of experience, respecting his individual beliefs, attitudes, and aptitudes. According to Gentile, the Spirit is the same for all, individual differences do not exist; people are neither stupid nor feeble-minded nor crippled, since the body is spirit, too. Consequently, the same type of teaching is good for all, without special considerations for the retarded or the handicapped.

Religion, on the other hand, since it is an inferior form of philosophy, does not set the goal of human life; it promises neither Paradise nor Hell, nor does it set ethical principles and standards. Why teach religion? Why form prejudices and preconcepts which will torment men later on and from which they will have to free themselves? Gentile, we know, answers that religion must be taught in order to instill a firm faith and a sense of security in the minds of pupils still immature, still all fantasy and ingenuity like the primitive men described by Vico in his New Science. But this means to cheat pupils, to teach them lies, and future adults can later on address to society and to their elders the same reproach that Leopardi poetically addressed to Mother Nature for betraying humanity by promising so many beautiful things which she never gave.

The same objection of contradition can be raised with regard to the specific role in society that Gentile assigns to women: the vestals of the domestic fire, as he calls them. The person here all at once reappears against the personality, the Spirit, and women reacquire their sex and femininity. Woman, Gentile affirms, “domi mansit.”¹⁶ The contradiction derives from the arbitrary passage from theory to practice, from Spirit to nature, while at the same time the distinctions are denied in a most categorical manner.

Furthermore, in the psyche of the child the object (God, religion, world, which all become one, according to Gentile) is not a momentary dialectic process, but in practice lasts many years, and the subject (the individual ego) will be humiliated, repressed, and sometimes killed by the pressure of the object, which is not God, omniscient and all-loving, but the teacher, the agent of the state clubbing the head of the pupil for many years. Consequently faith too in Gentile's philosophy is distorted and deprived of any real significance.

In his last book, Genesi e struttura della società,¹⁷ Gentile attempts to free himself from the abstractions of that gnoseological dialectics and speaks of a “humanism of work,” of a transcendental society “in interiore homine.” The individual finds in his “ego” the “alter,” the “socius,” with whom he establishes a rapport of cooperation and collaboration. But the recognition of the reality of man as an individual with all his rights, differences, needs, and ambitions remains illusory, because Gentile affirms that the community, immanent in the individual as his law, is the real basis of the existence of the individual. He speaks through her mouth, feels with her heart, thinks with her brain, and the person is as a result destroyed: he must think what society, the state dictates to him.

The problem of the relationship of the individual to society, to the state, has always been and still is a thorny one, but it is obvious that society and the state are created for individuals, who, if they are men of good will, cannot but have a good society, a good state. We can say that the most harmonious, most civilized state is that in which the single individual is able to realize himself in the highest form.

The Actual Idealism of Gentile must be seen as the culmination and the epilogue of modern philosophy, which began in the Renaissance with the hypostasis of man, putting the ego in the center of the universe; and his pedagogical theory as the synthesis of nineteenth century idealism as the Emile of Rousseau is the synthesis of the ideology and the educational aspirations of the French Enlightenment.

The Fascist regime and the last world war revealed the inner deficiencies of Actual Idealism and of the educational theory which sprang from it. Some of the Gentile's pupils,¹⁸ who witnessed the failure of Fascism and the disaster of the war, are presently re-examining Actual Idealism, trying to determine if it was only void rhetoric or if it contained some elements of truth. This has also been the purpose of our analysis of Gentile's educational theory. The question is naturally of a broader scope and involves any form of idealism: Has idealism run its course or will idealism survive because philosophy is by its very nature idealistic? How and to what extent can philosophical idealism help man solve contemporary problems? The answers to such questions can provide the answers to the following: How can Gentile's educational theory still be useful today?

In the course of our analysis we have pointed out some major deficiencies of Actual Idealism and of Gentile's educational theory, such as the defective conception of the state, and the detrimental consequences which may result from the reduction of the individual conscience to the ethical state. It may be added that Actual Idealism leaves unsolved a series of problems which are of the utmost importance nowadays, such as the role of science, man's relationship to society and to his natural environment, and the importance of religion and metaphysics. Problems which cannot be disregarded, because men are constantly at grips with specific and concrete human situations which are always problematic and which require, for their solution, not only general principles and abstract cognitions, but experience and factual knowledge as well. What seems most urgent today is neither blind activism nor a paternal or authoritative monologue, but an enlightening and fraternal dialogue. Man cannot be considered as a spiritual unity totally unrelated to other men and his physical world, unconcerned and indifferent before the meaning of his existence, before death and God, trying to drown his individual ego, his person in the universe or in an abstract society or state. This can be a poetic escape or relief like the pain of Leopardi in “Infinito” or the religious astonishment of Pascal before the infinity of space; but in real life man has to take a stand and solve real problems. He has to admit his limitations in order to recognize the presence and the rights of others; he has to seek a harmonious adjustment within himself and with the world outside himself, the reality of other people and of nature, which he must learn to respect, because the world is like an organism in which each member is vitally important to the survival of the whole and must contribute according to his energies and capacities. The idleness or the destructive works of certain groups directly affect the well-being of the rest.

The concept of the family, which Gentile puts at the center of human existence, should be extended to society, but not in word alone, and education should endeavor to produce a new humanism, “the humanism of work”, as Gentile rightly affirmed one year before his death. Philosophy, by providing a total vision of reality, should help improve the life of the individual and society and should not be relegated to academism or to arid disquisitions. Nor should it disdain science and technology, but use them for a fuller human existence. In Gentile's philosophy the problem of science remains instead ambiguous and secondary.

In education, on the other hand, psychology and methodology cannot be disregarded. One cannot teach an abstract human being but only an individual, a person who has a certain make-up and characteristics, who comes from a specific family, from a specific social background, who has certain specific psychological tendencies and mental and physical capabilities or limitations, which unless properly understood and considered in the educational process, may impede the spiritual and physical development of the individual. Education should help the individual to make a better social adjustment; it should free him from his natural isolation and put him in a position to develop his own individual personality in relation to other individuals in the society.

The major weakness of Gentile's conception of education, pointed out already, derives from a misconception of society, in which the individual is dissolved with the serious consequence of eliminating the interrelation and the interstimulation which are so vital in the teaching situation as well as in society. The equation of the individual before the universality and unity of the Spirit eliminates furthermore some of the vital functions of education, such as preparation for leadership and citizenship, and a diversified and well-organized vocational training program. It should be the teacher's obligation to interpret the individual interests and aptitudes of the pupils and to develop them, whereas Gentile would have the students subordinate their interests and personality to that of the teacher, and as citizens subordinate themselves to the state.

The most positive aspect of Gentile's educational theory consists in his view of education as essentially a spiritual process whose center of interest must be placed in man, and his stress on the mutual spiritual rapport between teacher and pupil as the indispensable prerequisite for the acquisition of knowledge and for the development of human character and a critical mind. Furthermore, it revalues Christianity and Humanism by resolving them in the active conscience of the individual: in a continuous self-sacrifice on behalf of society and civilization. In addition, school is viewed not as a place for indoctrination, but as a constant creative process developing one's capabilities and personality.

Such a conception of education aims to integrate the personality rather than to disintegrate and disorient it; it aims to give the individual command of himself, to help him find purpose and meaning in life, to express more fully his own spiritual resources and to help others do the same in order to transform existing conditions and to realize higher and freer forms of civil life.

Gentile's fundamental idea of education as formation of man is still valid today. The personality of the individual comes first, and before we make the technician and the specialist we must make the man and the citizen, or better, while we make the technician we must make the man.

Specialty yes, Gentile used to say, but always in homine: first thought and then matter, because technology is blind unless man furnishes it with his eyes and gives it the right direction.

Education must aim at a new type of humanism, a scientific humanism, as somebody has called it,¹⁹ though putting the stress more on the noun than on the adjective.

A new faith in thought and in man's capacities is necessary in education today. The political conception of Gentile must be refused, but his faith in thought as man's most dependable light is as essential today as ever in making man more human and society more like the ideal civitas humani generis.

Notes

1. Gentile's educational theory is expounded principally in two volumes of Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica: Vol. I: Pedagogia generale (5th ed.; Firenze: Sansoni, 1954), and Vol. II: Didattica (Ibid.), of which the first edition was published in 1913; and in La riforma dell'educazione, discorsi ai maestri di Trieste (5th ed.; Firenze: Sansoni, 1955), of which the first ed. was published in 1920. The latter work has been translated into English by Dino Bigongiari, Reform of Education (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1922).

2. For a complete exposition of Gentile's Actual Idealism, see in particular his Teoria generale dello Spirito-come atto puro (6th ed.; Firenze: Sansoni, 1944), 1st ed., 1916, trans. by H. Wildon Carr, The Theory of Mind as a Pure Act (London: Macmillan, 1922). An intelligent and thorough study of Gentile's philosophy has been done by H. S. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960).

3. La riforma dell'educazione, p. 139. This and other translations are mine.

4. Ibid., p. 141.

5. Ibid.

6. Most of Gentile's writings published in La Critica dealt with philosophy in Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century and were later published in volume: Le origini della filosofia contemporanea in Italia, Vol. XXXI-XXXIV of Opere (Firenze: Sansoni 1957); many of the essays on education, written in a different period, are contained in Scritti pedagogici (Milano-Roma: Treves, Treccani, Tumminelli), Vol. I, 1923; Vol. II, 1932. For a complete bibliography of Gentile's works see: Vito A. Bellezza, Giovanni Gentile, La vita e il pensiero, a cura della Fondazione Giovanni Gentile, Vol. III: Bibliografia degli scritti di Giovanni Gentile (Firenze: Sansoni, 1950).

7. “Il concetto scientifico della pedagogia,” paper read before the Accademia dei Lincei in 1900, pub. in Scritti di pedagogia, Vol. I: Educazione e scuola laica, pp. 23-24.

8. Ibid., p. 23.

9. Ibid., p. 34.

10. For a critique of Gentile's educational theory see: Armando Carlini, Giovanni Gentile, La vita e il pensiero, Vol. VIII (Firenze: Sansoni, 1958), pp. 125-151; also, the book of Merritt Moore Thompson, The Educational Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1934), as well as the above mentioned book by H. S. Harris.

11. Scritti pedagogici, I, 106.

12. Ibid., p. 116.

13. Ibid., p. 133.

14. For a detailed exposition of Gentile's Reform see: Howard R. Marrano, Nationalism in Italian Education (New York: Italian Digest and News Service, 1927), written mainly for advertisement of Gentile's Reform abroad; more critical in scope is the study by L. Minio-Paluello, Education in Fascist Italy (Oxford University Press, 1946), written at a time when the deficiencies of the Reform were already fully manifest.

15. Sommario di pedagogia, Vol. II: Didattica, p. 53.

16. Preliminari allo studio del fanciullo (Firenze: Sansoni, 1969), chapt. vi, written in 1921, p. 87.

17. (Firenze: Sansoni, 1945), trans. H. S. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960).

18. Especially Ugo Spirito. See Chapter vii of his book, Giovanni Gentile (Firenze: Sansoni, 1969).

19. Ugo Spirito, see his book, La Riforma della scuola (Florence: Sansoni, 1956). For a discussion of the problem of education in Italy today see also: Scritti sulla scuola of various authors (Milan: Società Editrice Vita e Pensiero, 1967).