ANSELLMI, GIUSEPPE. - Born in Cherasco in 1769 and died there in 1842, Abbot A. was first a teacher of rhetoric in Casale, then of literature at the Royal Military Academy in Turin. Studying the pedagogical problems of his time, A. proposed to Count Prospero Balbo and Francesco Napione—one president, the other a member of the Reform Magistracy—new principles of method and educational organization. Even within a vision that often had much that was abstract, wordy, and outdated, A. had some insightful pedagogical intuitions that distinguished him from the educational theorists of his era.
For example, A. did not fail to react against grammatical instruction as it was then practiced and also affirmed the need to appeal to the imagination, which is the first faculty to manifest itself in children; to this imagination, “it is not intellect or reasoning that ministers, but the bodily senses and above all the eyes for the images of objects.”
A. criticized the textbooks in use in mutual instruction schools and the use of little fables and moral precepts intended for children, aptly observing that “those so-called duties of man are a very heavy burden for children.” Since children are still governed by sense and imagination, “they want to see pictures of things, not to hear maxims or bare sermons about duties they do not yet know or understand, for they are not yet men. The maxims and precepts about duties must arise of themselves, as if by chance, from those very lessons I say are made for their childish imagination.” The teaching system, according to A., must be consistent “with the aims to which one who embarks on the path of study tends, and consistent also with the faculty of the soul that must apply itself to those aims,” because “a method of instruction, if it is to be profitable, must not clash with the faculties of the soul but must aim to develop them, to enrich them, and to guide them, not to confuse them, to stunt them, or to lead them astray down difficult and obscure paths.”
Even if his various textbooks did not always correspond to his methodological principles—where one can still detect the persistence of an abstract and literary vision far removed from the reality of the child’s soul—A. nevertheless exercised a notable influence on the pedagogical direction of his time. Here and there he encountered opposition, which, after the liberal failures of 1821, forced him to withdraw from teaching.
He wrote: *Corso d'Istruzione*, Turin 1803; *Pro studiis instaurandis* (a Latin oration delivered on 12 December 1814 at the Casale College, with an attached Italian *Idea di una correzione al sistema di pubblica istruzione*), Turin 1818; *Scuola della puerizia*, Turin 1819, 1820, and 1821.