Promoting Social and Political Change Through Pedagogy: Lorenzo Milani and the Barbiana School (Italy 1954–1967)

Abstract

This chapter describes the curriculum and pedagogy implemented at Barbiana, a small school in a remote and mountainous place in Italy. Still revered in Europe as one of the most interesting innovative teaching experiences, the school started in 1954 when Lorenzo Milani, a Catholic priest committed to work with the poor who had run an afterschool program in a working-class parish in an industrial city close to Florence, was sent to this location because of his leftist views. Milani believed that schools were class-based institutions that benefited bourgeois children and that excluded working-class and farmworker students. To reverse this situation, Milani contended that education for these students should focus on mastering the Italian language since, he argued, it was the lack of such mastery that prevented poor people from articulating their social demands. At Barbiana, Milani brought this belief to life by opening a school that placed language at the core of the curriculum and where he engaged students in the critical reading of their own social realities and their own process of schooling. The school was closed in 1967 after Milani’s premature death.