Giovanni Gentile and the 1923 School Reform: What Changed in Italian Education

Who was Giovanni Gentile

Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, in the province of Trapani, in 1875 and died in Florence in 1944. He was a philosopher, a historian of philosophy and a politician. He entered the Senate in 1922, and from 31 October of that year he ran the education ministry in Mussolini’s first government. From 1923 to 1929 he sat on the Grand Council of Fascism. He joined fascism because he saw it as the heir of the Historical Right and its work on the Risorgimento.

How his philosophy fits with the regime is a topic of its own, covered in Giovanni Gentile: Actual Idealism and Fascism.

Where Italian schooling started from

The school system of the new Kingdom of Italy had been fixed by the Casati law of 1859-60, and for several decades the structure stayed that way, with partial adjustments. Between 1859 and 1923 there were many plans to reform the liceo-ginnasio, the classical secondary school, and none came to anything. Before Gentile, Benedetto Croce had tried, as education minister in the last Giolitti government in 1920-21: his reform of the state exams met rejection in Parliament and protests outside it, and according to Giuseppe Tognon, the historian who wrote Treccani’s essay on the reform, that closed the door on a shared one.

On 3 December 1922 the Mussolini government obtained full powers to reform the state. Gentile had twenty months in office, until 1 July 1924, and he spent them on schools, working with Lombardo Radice and Codignola.

Few elements of the new system were truly new. Almost everything had already been presented and debated before Mussolini took office, and Gentile claimed as much: defending himself in the Senate on 5 February 1925, he said he had invented nothing. Treccani still judges it the most coherent school reform since Italian unification, and for Tognon it is the most important of the twentieth century.

The Gentile reform of 1923: the three decrees

The reform is not a single law. It is made up of three royal decrees from 1923:

Decree	Date	Subject
No. 1054	6 May 1923	Ordering of middle education and the national boarding schools
No. 2102	30 September 1923	Higher education
No. 2185	1 October 1923	Primary education

The first took effect on 17 June 1923. Its article 1 divides middle schools into two levels. The lower level covers the complementary school and the ginnasio (the first years of classical studies), along with the lower courses of the technical and teacher-training institutes. The upper level includes the liceo (the classical lyceum), the scientific lyceum and the girls’ lyceum, plus the upper courses of those same institutes.

The Gentile reform: main points

Primary school and compulsory schooling

According to Tognon, primary school went from four years to five, split into two cycles of three and two years, with an extra three-year vocational course on top. Decree no. 2185 raised compulsory schooling by law to age 14 and, for the first time, extended it to blind and deaf children. It is not recorded how far the rule was actually followed in the 1920s and 1930s.

Gentile increased spending on primary schools, even with a tight budget. But the way the money was allocated ended up favoring urban schools over rural ones, where illiteracy was higher.

Religion

The Catholic religion entered primary school. Tognon speaks of wide but limited room for it, while INDIRE, the research body of Italy’s education ministry, writes of compulsory teaching. In secondary schools religious teaching was made optional, given by people appointed by church authorities at families’ explicit request. The Popular Party welcomed with enthusiasm a reform that brought the Catholic religion into primary schools and a state exam at the end of each cycle.

Secondary school

The ginnasio-liceo was the favored school, and Gentile called it the main nursery of the nation’s upper classes. The modern lyceum, which taught no Greek, and the teacher-training ginnasi were abolished in 1923. In their place came the four-year scientific lyceum, which absorbed the modern, physics-and-mathematics streams of the older lyceums and technical schools, and opened the way to university science faculties. Latin was taught in every secondary school except the complementary ones.

The normal schools, which trained primary teachers, were cut from 153 to 87 and turned into a lower and an upper teachers’ institute: seven years in all, with a standing equal to the other upper institutes. The complementary schools, created in 1923 to prepare pupils for work, were a more modest kind of lower middle school meant for the working classes of the cities. In 1928 they became vocational training schools. Tognon says the lower middle class saw them as a fallback for working-class children.

Gentile wanted an education that formed pupils, built on direct contact with the classical authors, in place of one that simply delivered information from textbooks. Secondary school took on a strongly classical character, meant to train a new ruling class. The modern and vocational schools were renewed, and Gentile recognized the value of aesthetic and religious education and promoted physical education and sport.

Esempio pratico: a girl who, after the reform, finishes five years of primary school has to pick a path. For the ginnasio she sits an entrance exam, set by the school receiving her and not by the one she comes from. For the complementary school, created to prepare pupils for work, the course ahead is more modest. In secondary education the cap on places is managed through that very exam.

Exams, private schools and administration

Pupils entered secondary school, and moved up a level, through entrance exams. According to Tognon this rule did not outlast fascism. The final secondary exam was held in only forty venues across Italy. Private schools were admitted next to public ones, but the state supervised both through the state exam.

Administration became centralized: the provincial school councils were abolished and 19 regional education offices were set up. INDIRE describes a bureaucratic centralism, with head teachers and school directors answerable to their superiors.

The criticism

While he was minister, Gentile was criticized by fascists, anti-fascists, trade groups and parents. They accused him of an elitist view of teaching and of loading students with too much work.

For Treccani the conservative intent shows in the aim of containing school attendance, in the rigid internal selection and in the split between schools for the ruling classes and vocational ones. Among the limits the encyclopedia lists an overrating of literary subjects against scientific and technical ones. At the same time it sees in the reform one of the loftiest modern conceptions of schooling and of the unity of knowledge. Tognon places its best and most lasting side in the attention to children’s needs, more than in the solutions for secondary school.

In November 1922 Gentile asked for obedience to the state. According to Tognon, most people in the field, Croce included, took that appeal as a necessary fresh start. Liberal democrats close to Gobetti, and the communists, found the reform sound in many parts, but the fascist political setting and the philosophy behind it magnified its limits. That is Tognon’s own summary, not the verdict of a single author.

What lasted after Gentile

Gentile resigned on 14 June 1924, after the kidnapping of Matteotti, and the resignation was ratified on 1 July. From 1924 the reform was revised through the so-called policy of adjustments, which led to the School Charter of 1939. Treccani writes that in the following years it was adjusted, partly sidestepped and made fit the regime’s aims more closely.

On 18 March 1931, in the Council of Ministers, Mussolini judged the 1923 reform a mistake: in his words, the times and the mindset of the people who had made it were to blame. In the 1930s, writes Bruno Rosada, regime figures were no longer satisfied.

For Tognon the reform outlived condemnations that were purely political. A middle school for children aged 11 to 14 who wanted to continue their studies had already been set up by law no. 899 of 1940. At the end of 1962 Parliament approved the unified middle school (law no. 1859), which replaced every other type of school for that age group and brought a longer period of compulsory schooling and a large expansion of the school system.