Itinerarios historiográficos sobre orientaciones y direcciones culturales transmitidas por los libros de texto en la Italia posterior a la unificación

Abstract

The historical-pedagogical events that have marked the history of the school book have been the subject of normative provisions in the period between national unification and the advent of fascism. Already in the aftermath of the Unification, when education was extended to all citizens, although in different ways, the role of the textbook remained uncertain for some decades, parallel to the progressive definition of the school system. It was not only the increase in the number of students enrolled in compulsory education that motivated the evolution of the main teaching tool, but above all the attention of governments, which regulated its use in school curricula. The need arose to focus on the school and its books to create a moral and cultural basis common to all Italians, to form their "character" and to build the national identity of the new citizens.

If on the one hand we have learned to consider the processes of literacy as not necessarily coinciding with those of schooling, studying them as the result of autonomous and personal paths of appropriation of knowledge today delegated to the school, on the other hand the vital importance of restoring value to all those tools, such as school textbooks, which allow us to know and analyze the history of school and education and the different teaching models that are  They follow one another over time.

With this work it is proposed to reconstruct, also through the normative provisions, the complexes of the textbook, one of the most effective tools to form the consciences of schoolchildren and future citizens.