ANSELMI, GIUSEPPE. — Born at Cherasco in 1769 and died there in 1842, Abbé A. was first a teacher of rhetoric at Casale, and subsequently of literature at the R. Military Academy of Turin. A student of the pedagogical problems of his time, A. proposed to Count Prospero Balbo and Francesco Napione, the former president and the latter a member of the Magistrato di Riforma, new principles of method and of the organization of teaching. Although his outlook does contain much that is abstract, verbalistic, and antiquated, A. had certain felicitous pedagogical intuitions that distinguish him from the educational theorists of his age.
A., for example, did not fail to react against the grammatical teaching then in use, nor did he fail to assert the need to appeal to the imagination, which is “the first faculty to become manifest in children”; for this imagination, “not intellect or reasoning are ministers, but the bodily senses, and above all the eyes through images of objects.”
A. criticized the textbooks in use in schools of mutual instruction, as well as the use of the little fables and moral maxims that were intended to be imparted to children, aptly observing that “those so-called duties of man are an exceedingly burdensome matter for children.” Children, being still sensation and imagination, “want to see pictures of things, and not hear maxims, nor bare sermons on duties unknown to them and not yet understood by them, since they are not yet men. The maxims and sayings concerning duties must spring of themselves, as if by chance, from those very lessons which I say are made for their childish imagination.” According to A., the system of instruction must be coherent “with the ends toward which he who sets foot on the path of study strives, and at the same time coherent with the faculty of the soul that must be applied to those ends,” because “a method of instruction, if it is to be profitable, must not clash with the faculties of the soul, but must tend to develop them by following, nourishing, and directing them, rather than confusing, withering, and causing them to lose their way along difficult and dark paths.” Although his various attempts at books for children did not always correspond to his methodological principles, and although they still reveal the persistence of an abstract and literary outlook far removed from the reality of the child’s soul, A. nevertheless exercised a notable influence on the pedagogical orientation of his time. Here and there he encountered opposition which, after the liberal failures of ’21, 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 Collegio di Casale, with the Idea di una correzione al sistema di pubblica istruzione appended in Italian), Turin 1818; Scuola della puerizia, Turin 1819, 1820, and 1821.