Chapter Ten - Educating Resisters (1947–1968)

Summary

Educational reform was an interest Ada had wanted to pursue before the Fascists came to power and had to suspend for more than twenty-five years. According to socialist activist and politician Maria Magnani Noya, her experience as an antifascist teacher influenced her ideas for school reform. For Ada, it was not simply a matter of reversing the effects of the fascistization of the schools; it was a question of reforming the outdated educational system that Italy had possessed since the Risorgimento. Education was compulsory only until age eleven: the establishment of compulsory education until age fourteen had to wait until after 1958. In elementary and secondary schools, rote memorization, recitation before the class, and regurgitation of the textbook were the norm. Failure to pass the annual examination meant that students were forced to repeat the entire year. Science was almost nonexistent in the curriculum. Moreover, the Catholic Church had direct access to the students in state schools because the continuation of the Lateran Accords meant compulsory religious education for all students. The university system graduated too many students, and they could not find jobs. Most importantly, students were not taught to think for themselves. Would such a system lead young people to accept blindly another Mussolini?

Education played a major role in Ada's democratic vision. She wrote, “When we speak of democratic education, we confirm the profound formative significance of democracy: independent of this, independent of liberty that has been attained, or that is on the road to being attained, true education cannot exist.” Education was another way in which Ada continued to resist, fighting against established norms, obsolete methods, and an educational system that failed to develop a political conscience in the young people of Italy. Many had credited Mussolini's success in appealing to the young for the long tenure of his fascist regime. Now antifascists like Ada staged what educator Gianni Rodari called “a useful and just battle for school reform.”