Authoritative image: "Among school children" and Italian education reform, The

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 1997 by Harper, Margaret Mills

Gentile locates the real in the act and identifies human freedom and pleasure with the real so constructed: "The thinking is activity, and what is thought is a product of the activity, that is, a thing. The activity as such is causa sui and therefore it is freedom. The thing is a simple effect which has the principle of its own being outside it, and therefore is mechanism" (Theory of Mind 256). If such ideas were transferred into the daily work of a school, then, we might expect that Gentile would propose labor to be "blossoming or dancing" when process, not product, is emphasized.

In terms of education, Gentile's theories proceed on just these lines. The phrase "active education" became the educational equivalent of "actual idealism," and the reforms carried out in Gentile's name attacked sterile, rote learning in favor of process-oriented activity. Art, history, religion, and philosophy, which are imaginative arts in Gentile's way of thinking, are emphasized. Science, materialism, and disciplines that follow Aristotle in regarding the individual mind as separate from the reality it considers, are criticized. These constructions are abstractions from and reductions of the central reality of unified and living culture, abstractions which imprison people in an illusory world of multeity that requires human passivity in the face of its independent existence. "What good teachers do," according to Gentile, "is affirm the liberty of their pupils by having them hear their own words in the words they learn, basically. The idea alone is real" (Reform 68). He speaks of"man, who believes himself an individual, but is in truth humanity considered momentarily in one of its fragments" (Reform 88).

Yeats was paraphrasing Gentile when he proposed to the Irish Literary Society (in November 1925) the necessity of making education local:

The tendency of the most modern education, that in Italy, let us say, is to begin geography with your native fields, arithmetic by counting the school chairs and measuring the walls, history with local monuments, religion with the local saints, and then to pass on from that to the nation itself. (Senate Speeches 17-7)

A progression of outward movements ends with the idea of the nation. For Gentile, a universal spirit of humanity "realizes historically its universality in the community of the family, of the city, of the district, and of the nation," so that finally "it may be said that I, as a citizen, have indeed a will of my own; but that upon further investigation my will is found to coincide exactly with the will of the State, and I want anything only in so far as the State wants me to have it" (Reform 26, 29).

The ominous tone in this last statement is obvious. As Antonio Gramsci was quick to notice, such educational notions perpetuate and accentuate the power of certain institutions and classes by restricting knowledge of disciplines that require "a certain dogmatism" if they are to be mastered. In their place, another, unquestioned dogmatism is given prominence (in Italy, religious education, which was emphasized so much that, in Gramsci's words, "the whole history of philosophy is now implicitly seen as a succession of ravings and delusions" [41]). A deemphasis upon "facts" reduces historical awareness; the assumption that learners are passive if they are not given creative opportunities paradoxically creates passivity in that students are assumed not to be able to discover the relevance of civilization to their own lives. Civilization itself will not advance, Gramsci fears: