ANSELMI, GIUSEPPE. - Born at Cherasco in 1769 and died there in 1842, the abbot A. was first a teacher of rhetoric at Casale, then of letters at the Royal Military Academy of Turin. A student of the pedagogical problems of his time, A. proposed to Count Prospero Balbo and to Francesco Napione, the one president and the other member of the Magistracy of Reform, new principles of method and of didactic organization. Even within a vision that is not without much that is abstract, verbalistic and antiquated, A. has some happy pedagogical intuitions that distinguish him from the pedagogists of his epoch.
A., for example, does not fail to react against grammatical teaching as it was then practiced, and does not fail either to affirm the need to appeal to the imagination, which is « the first to make itself manifest in children »; to which imagination « not intellect or reasoning are ministers, but the bodily senses and above all the eyes for the images of objects ».
A. criticized the textbooks in use in the schools of mutual instruction, and the use of the little fables and moral sentences that were meant to be imparted to children, opportunely observing that « those so-called duties of man are a very burdensome thing for children ». Children, being still sense and imagination, « want to see pictures of things, and not to hear maxims, nor bare sermons of duties not known nor even yet known by them, who are not yet men. The maxims and sentences concerning duties must spring of themselves, as if by chance, from those very lessons which I say are made for their puerile imagination ». The system of teaching must be, according to A., coherent « with the ends to which he who sets foot in the career of studies tends, and coherent at the same time with the faculty of the soul that must apply itself to those ends », because « a mode of teaching, if it is to be profitable, must not clash with the faculties of the soul, but tend to develop them by seconding them, to fertilize them and direct them, not indeed to confuse them, sterilize them and make them lose their way along difficult and dark paths ». Even if they were not always consistent with his methodical principles, his various attempts at books for children, where one may still note the persistence of an abstract and literary vision far from the reality of the infant soul, A. nevertheless exercised a notable influence on the pedagogical direction of his time. Here and there he did not lack oppositions which, after the liberal failures of '21, forced him to withdraw from teaching.
He wrote: Corso d'Istruzione, Turin 1803; Pro studiis instaurandis (Latin oration delivered on 12 Dec. 1814 in the College of Casale, with appended, in Italian, the Idea di una correzione al sistema di pubblica istruzione), Turin 1818; Scuola della puerizia, Turin 1819, 1820 and 1821.