INFANT SCHOOL. «That man's education must begin from earliest infancy is a requirement that can be discerned throughout the entire history of pedagogy. From Aristotle to Quintilian to the pedagogues of the Humanist movement to Comenius to Rousseau, to name only the greatest, all think that the child's education would be seriously compromised if it were not provided for from the tenderest age. However, infant schools properly so called are, one might say, an entirely modern institution, appearing in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. This does not mean, however, that throughout the entire course of the history of education and of educational institutions one cannot register pedagogical requirements and initiatives aimed at gathering children up to the age of six or seven into suitable premises, both to guard them better and to give them some instruction. There is no need here to note how the care of infancy is, in many respects, a product of Christianity; not that in the ancient world there was no care and love for children, but only Jesus raised children up to himself, exalting their purity and their innocence. «Whoever welcomes one of these little ones, says Jesus, welcomes me» (Mt. 18:5). Thus from the Middle Ages onward we can find good examples that tell us of this particular care that Christians placed in the education of infancy. The priest Dateo in 787 founded in Milan a hospice for poor children, a hospice that lasted until 1456. In this hospice the youngest were cared for by nurses and the older ones were instructed in singing and in elementary knowledge. Other benefactors of infancy did not fail to found, in the course of the years, other institutions of the kind, such as St. Jerome Milani in the early sixteenth century in Venice and in other cities; St. Joseph Calasanz in Rome and its surroundings in 1597; the priest Lorenzo Garaventa, who founded in Liguria in 1770 a hospice for abandoned children; not to mention the work carried out in Paris by St. Vincent de Paul around 1638 and that, in Rome, of Tatu Giovanni, as the charitable Roman bricklayer Giovanni Borghi (1732-98) was commonly called. Comenius in the seventeenth century, among his other happy intuitions, also had that of conceiving a true and proper maternal school, «schola materni gremii», whose task was to impart in simple form and through sensory intuition and games the first elements of moral and religious life and the first rudiments of knowledge (cf. O. Cicogna Argentini, s. v. in Dizionario delle scienze pedag., Milan 1929). The prevailing idea that the first education belongs to the mother had the consequence of preventing the rise, until the threshold of the contemporary age, of a true and proper school organization suited to gathering and educating children up to the age of six. Now there is no doubt that in many families the education of the little ones became impossible owing to the fact that mothers, either because incapable or because occupied for the entire day in work, often outside and far from their own home, were not in a position to care for their children, who, left to themselves, were forced to live more in the street than in the house, exposed, naturally, to all the bad examples that could come to them from it. To avoid this, here and there, in the various countries of Europe, custody rooms arose which, while seeking to avoid one drawback, created others, because those tender creatures were, for the most part, gathered into rooms not always hygienically suitable, confined in cramped environments and benches, governed by personnel not always prepared, who, even if good at custody, were not so at education.
To have in Europe the infant school that had at the same time the purpose of assistance and that of education, we must arrive at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. The first true work of an educational character is that founded in Alsace by Jean Frédéric Oberlin (v.) of Strasbourg, a Protestant pastor, who, with the collaboration of Luisa Schepler (1763-1837), established, from as early as 1769, various infant schools in the villages of his parish of Waldersbach, entrusting their care to women, peasant women of the villages themselves, but previously trained for the task to which they were called. The first infant school was inaugurated in 1771. Gradually they came to be extended through the various villages of the parish. In these infant schools the children were given instruction in singing, easy elements of history and geography; episodes from the Bible were read to them, and they were trained in small tasks. The women sat in the midst of the children, entertaining them with the telling of fairy tales and little stories, organizing their games, guiding them in the construction of paper objects, and furthermore showing them pictures, animals, plants. Oberlin started from the principle that one should speak to children only of those things that fell under their senses. The children's life, moreover, was to unfold, as far as this was possible, in the open air, so that it might always be possible for them to enjoy and observe nature in its various phenomena. The children, then, in contact with the instructresses and in mutual relationship with their companions, were to learn the ways of behaving well in society and were to accustom themselves to overcoming the dialect in order to speak the national language.
Another philanthropist to whom the founding of the a. at the beginning of the 19th century is owed is the Scotsman Robert Owen (v.), who in 1800 established in his cotton mill at New Lanark the first of his a. ("infant schools") for children from the age of two upwards, and who subsidized those educational works which seemed to him to contribute to promoting the progress of the people. Owen was led to found the a. by the fact that many of his female workers were compelled, in order to attend to their work in the factory, to leave their tender young children at home unattended. Owen's institution, therefore, born of a humanitarian motive, later acquired a wholly educational purpose. In Owen's a. no religious instruction was given, and this so that, according to Owen, attendance might be permitted to children of all religious confessions. In order to prevent bad acts in the children and to make them acquire the habit of gentleness and goodness, a continuous supervision was exercised over the children. In Owen's a. learning was intuitive. Owen, who had visited Pestalozzi's school, wanted the bodies and their qualities to be learned by the children by showing them objects or their models. The conversations in Owen's a., so that they might better contribute to learning, were conducted in a familiar manner. Play was cultivated as recreation and pastime. In Owen's a., however, as later in Aporti's, the teachers did not succeed in freeing themselves from the use of books and from instruction of an erudite character, so that Owen felt, at a certain point, the need to entrust (1815) the a. to one of his workers, Joseph Buchanan, who, by his good nature and his intelligence, had better than the others understood the nature of the institution and its purposes. Buchanan, who loved children, resolved precisely in love toward children many problems of infant education which outside the love and sacrifice of the teacher can hardly find a solution. Buchanan was later (1819) sent to London, where he opened the first a. and shortly afterwards a school for the preparation of a. teachers. Owen's method was perfected by another apostle of infant education, Samuel Wilderspin. Meanwhile the institution took root in England, where a society for a. was constituted, whose number rose to 200. In the Infant Schools, as, moreover, in all analogous institutions in Europe before Fröbel, there generally persisted the defect of concerning itself a little too much with instruction to the detriment of true education properly so called. A defect that an Italian, Pietro Giordani, was to note when, writing in 1844 to Nicolò Puccini, he observed that the aim of the a. is "morality not vanity" and that by their means the task is to make "the poor little children good," "not to make them doctors or rather parrots, loading and oppressing those still-closed minds with most vain and useless chatter."
The initiative of Oberlin and, above all, that of Owen did not remain without imitators, and it may be said that in all parts of Europe and in various countries of America, especially in the first half of the 19th century, there was a rush to found a. which took various names, such as Salles d'asile in France, Scuole guardiane in Belgium and Denmark, Bexar School in Holland, Infant Schools in England and in the United States of America, amole and a. d'i. in Italy. Moreover, infant institutions were not lacking in Russia, Austria, Prussia and Portugal.
The French Salles d'asile may, at first, be considered as an offshoot of Owen's schools, although they later departed from them by placing some limit on the instruction to be given to children. The first a. in Paris was founded by Pastoret (1766-1843), who promoted a women's committee for the establishment of Salles d'asile, sending one of the directresses to England to visit Buchanan's institute and to study its method. Another Frenchman at this same time, Cochin, mayor of the 12th arrondissement of Paris, set about studying Buchanan's method, of which he arranged the translation of the Manual for the educators; moreover he opened a model a. with an attached course, directed by Millet, for the preparation of teachers. Millet, after visiting the infant schools, wrote a book, Observations sur le système de l'École d'Angleterre pour la première enfance. She envisaged the necessity of having a large hall and a spacious courtyard, the latter rich in plants useful for observation. She wanted instructive conversations to be activated in the a., and silence to reign there. Sacred songs were performed in chorus; the children had to imitate collectively gymnastic movements performed by the teacher. The alphabet, counting, and arithmetic were sung. This last defect was not slow to transfer itself later to Italy and to be lamented in our a. The salles d'asile did not always correspond to the purposes for which they had been constituted, above all because of the unpreparedness of the teachers, who, lacking a good fundamental culture, did not succeed in the three months of attendance at the preparatory school in acquiring the fitness for their office. A reform of the method adopted in these a. was attempted by Marie Pape Carpentier (1815-75) by recommending easy, brief and intuitive lessons. In France, even after all the European experiments, the Salles d'asile* never freed themselves of their defect of being, that is, true schools that overloaded the tender minds of children, incapable of bearing it, with a baggage of knowledge: reading, writing, history, natural history, geography, arithmetic.
Italy, although after the French and English examples, nonetheless did not fail to give life and growth to the institution of the asilo d'infanzia [infant school], whose founding is owed to Abbot Ferrante Aporti (v.), who in 1827 founded the first asilo in Cremona, receiving there children of comfortable means from 2 to 6 years of age; and on 24 January 1829 he established a fee-paying infant school, at the head of which he placed the Cremonese don Alessandro Gallina. Toward the end of 1830 Aporti was able to open the first free asilo, receiving there 34 children from 3 to 6 years of age; in 1833 he opened an asilo for girls and in '34 at S. Martino dell'Argine, the first rural asilo d'infanzia. The Aportian institution in a short span of time spread to every part of Italy, especially the central-northern part, arousing everywhere broad approval and opposition. The entire liberal current made itself the champion of the new institution, which however did not fail to arouse distrust in some currents of Italian public opinion, so that it is worth noting how, for example, Count Della Margherita in Piedmont feared that in the asili the children of the people were being educated to become indifferent in religion, and how at first (17 Aug. 1837) a circular of the Holy Office forbade the introduction of the asili into the Papal State, even if immediately afterward (27 Nov. 1837) another circular clarified that infant schools long since introduced were not prohibited in general, there being some in Rome itself according to approved regulations; but strictly those justified in the circular (La Civiltà Cattolica, 1928, 1, p. 387; III, pp. 229-30). With the accession of Pius IX to the pontifical throne, in Rome and in other cities of the Church State infant asili were founded through private initiative, and in 1847 the prefect of the Congregation of Studies wrote to the bishops to promote the founding and growth of such asili. After the fall of the Roman Republic the asili continued their life. In the Veneto and in Lombardy, in Piedmont and in Tuscany the infant asili spread widely, supported by educators, by pedagogists, by politicians, by philanthropists who made of them almost a motif of the political struggle they were waging in other spheres. In Florence the institution of the asili was advocated, among others, by Lambruschini, who saw in the asili "the seeds of that union between classes and classes, of that alliance between the poor and the rich, between the noble and the plebeian, of that fellowship of ideas, affections and actions that make men a true society." In Pisa and in Livorno the institution was supported and contributions made to the founding of asili by Luigi Frassi, Matilde Calandrini, Enrico Mayer, all of Protestant religion and in relations of friendship with Lambruschini. In Piedmont the asili found supporters among the men of the liberal current, among whom are to be remembered Camillo Cavour and Carlo Boncompagni (1804-80). In July 1837 the first Piedmontese asilo was founded at Rivarolo Canavese by Maurizio Farina, a friend of Aporti, and a year later (24 Aug. 1838)
a petition signed, among others, by Farina himself, by Camillo Cavour, by Cesare Alfieri, by Carlo Boncompagni was addressed to the king of Sardinia to obtain the license to constitute a society of infant schools. The petition, personally opposed by the aforementioned Count Della Margherita, was in 1839 personally granted by the king, who however arranged that the custody and education of the children be entrusted to religious congregations. Still with reference to the institution of the asili in Piedmont, one cannot fail to recall briefly the work expended by Carlo Tancredi Falletti, marquis of Barolo (1782-1838), and by his wife Giulietta Colbert de Manlevrier (1785-1864), who attempted to open an asilo in 1825, succeeding fully in 1829, as Silvio Pellico testifies, taking inspiration from the salles d'asile of the Pastoret, which the marquises had visited in Paris. Barolo, who had a realistic vision of the asili and of their function in the early formation of children, published in Turin in 1832 a pamphlet Sull'educazione dell'infanzia nella classe indigente. Brevi cenni dedicati alle persone caritatevoli. The Barolos wished the conduct of the asili to be entrusted to nuns because of the spirit of sacrifice that such a mission requires, and to this end they founded the Congregation of the Sisters of Providence, afterward called of St. Anne. Still in Piedmont there was no lack of other institutions of asili: Countess Eufrasia Valperga Masino, in 1833, opened an asilo in her palace in Turin, and Charles Albert himself in 1838 opened another asilo in the buildings of the Royal Palace, entrusting its direction to the Sisters of St. Anne.
In Naples every attempt to give life to the institution of the asili remained, one may say, fruitless because of the aversion it encountered in the government. Of this state of affairs Giacomo Savarese complains, when writing on 10 June 1840 to Vieuxseus he must note that against the asili were placed "all the opposing obstacles that the most senseless and foolish indifference for the public good can oppose to a useful novelty."
In Sicily too there was no lack, on the part of the prince of Scordia, of an attempt, which however remained fruitless, to open asili, which could be realized only in 1860.
After the political failure of 1849 the asili declined here and there, but the seed had been sown and could not fail to bear good fruit. Once national unity was in fact accomplished, the infant asili grew throughout Italy, extending also to the territories of the old kingdom of the Two Sicilies and into the former duchy of Modena, where the institution had been least able to take root. In the year 1871-72 there were in Italy 1009 public asili alone, with 130,806 enrolled. Meanwhile a reform was becoming necessary in the infant asilo. At bottom, even in its various aspects, the institution had a common foundation that could be identified in the preoccupation with engaging the tender minds of the little ones in the acquisition of an instruction that cannot be the whole purpose of this institution. Play, even if it was held in honor and considerably considered, remained there always as recreation and pastime, not as an act, the only one, of the child's life. Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel undertook with success a reform of the method in the infant asili; from the doctrine of Pestalozzi, whom he visited at Yverdon, he drew the profound conviction of the freedom of the child, which is manifested entirely in play as the intimate act of his life. Man's nature is realized in doing, and in play, which is a mode, the only mode, of the child's doing, the child places himself at the center of his world and feels it as his creation. Through his doing he makes himself a creator, and therefore imitates and can know God, the creator of all things. The child's life moreover unfolds better in contact with nature, and therefore the Fröbelian institution will be established in the garden and will in fact be called Kindergarten. Fröbel's kindergartens spread rapidly in the various countries of Europe. In Italy the Fröbelian method met with the Aportian one, certainly contributing to attune it better psychologically to the nature of the child.
The baroness Bertha von Marenholtz-Bülow (1810-93) became the propagator of the Froebelian method; in various works she explained the master's thought and indicated play as the occupation best suited to the different stages of children's development, also asserting the need to start the child on work as the best form capable of developing his artistic spontaneity. After Fröbel's death, Marenholtz went to London, Paris, Belgium, and Switzerland, spreading her master's ideas everywhere and promoting the founding of kindergartens. In Italy interest in kindergartens was not lacking; indeed Abbot Iacopo Bernardi and Giuseppe Sacchi (v.) studied the new method, while the pedagogue Abbot Rayneri was sent abroad around 1858 by the Piedmontese government, on Aporti's proposal, to visit some kindergartens and report on them, as he did report, to the Sardinian Minister of Public Instruction of the time. A few years later (1863) Gaetano Cammarota went, on assignment from the Italian government, to Switzerland to visit the two kindergartens existing there, one in Geneva, the other in Lausanne. In 1869 the priest Carlo Uttini (v.) successfully experimented, in his infant school in Piacenza, with certain procedures of the Froebelian method suitably adapted to the Italian mentality. Around 1870 kindergartens received a notable impulse in Italy, above all through the fervent work of Adolfo Pick (v.), Bohemian by birth but Italian by choice, who became the champion of the Froebelian method in Italy. In Venice in 1871 he inaugurated the kindergarten "Vittorino da Feltre," from which the best kindergarten teachers of the time also came. Also in Venice, in 1868, Signora Adele Levi della Vida had founded a kindergarten in which teachers were also trained. But in the last years of the past century the Froebelian kindergartens gradually became almost rigid in a formal mechanism that seemed to arrest rather than promote the spontaneity and freedom of children; whence at the beginning of the century a reform of the kindergarten was undertaken, above all through the work of Rosa Agazzi (v.) and Maria Montessori (v.), the latter with her Case dei bambini, the former with the Nuovo a. di Mompiano (Brescia), effectively assisted, Agazzi, by her sister Carolina and by the director of the Brescia schools P. Pasquali. To the Froebelian principle of the child's activity Agazzi adds the necessity of placing the child in a condition to act, reducing the school to an essential moment of life, indeed to a true and proper act of life that finds expression above all in work. The mechanical Froebelian world is replaced by a whole world of reality, the one that the school itself presents to us through contact between child and children, between these and the teacher and the environment. A school that becomes society and therefore a practical and moral act. Montessori's method, as Montessori herself expounds it in her two works: Il metodo della pedagogia scientifica applicato all'educazione infantile nelle case dei bambini, Città di Castello 1909, and L'autoeducazione, Rome 1917, is founded on "liberty," the self-education of the child, virtually guided by the teacher, by means of the proportioned environment (children's houses) where he can "polarize his attention" and become aware by himself of errors in the use of the various objects, of the "material" prepared for this purpose (insets, carved letters, etc.). The Montessori method was often interpreted in a naturalistic sense, that is, in Rousseau's sense, but it is instead susceptible of correct interpretation and application also in religious instruction (cf. M. Montessori, I bambini viventi nella Chiesa, Naples 1922) as Father Mario Barbera maintains (Le case dei bambini e il metodo Montessori, Rome 1927, and in La Civiltà Cattolica, 1919, II, 37, 219, 430; 1922, IV, 451; 1930, II, 238). In the organization of kindergartens in Italy the State intervened, first through the Ministry of the Interior, then through the Ministry of Public Instruction, prescribing by Royal Decree of 1 October 1923, no. 2185, a legal qualification for kindergarten teachers, after a three-year course at the "School of Method," and the programs for the "preparatory grade" or "maternal school": religion, prayer, religious songs, free drawing, recitation, gymnastic games, hygienic habits, easy manual work exercises, gardening, rudiments of notions and correction of popular prejudices and superstitions.
Still to be remembered are: the infant schools of Montesca and Rovigliano founded for the children of farmers by Alice and L. Franchetti, schools in which the cult of nature reigns and where the children practice gardening and field work; the kindergarten attached to Giuseppina Pizzigoni's Scuola rinnovata in Milan, in which, while gardening is practiced, care is taken to promote the development of the children's spirit of initiative and self-discipline. Another initiative is the kindergarten of Rina Nigrioli at Portomaggiore (Ferrara), where nature is felt in the manner of Pascoli, with outdoor games, cultivation of the fields, etc. Outside Italy, mention should be made of the experiments of John Dewey (v.) in the United States of America and of Ovide Decroly (v.) in Belgium. Dewey's kindergarten finds its foundation in the children's instinct for association and for doing. Decroly aims to prepare the child for life by creating for the child himself a natural and non-conventional environment, so that there may be no gap or discordance between school and life.
From 1870 onward, kindergartens in Italy increased steadily both in number and in attendance. Thus if in 1881-82 there were in Italy 2,516 kindergartens with 243,972 enrolled and in 1901-1902, 2,314 kindergartens with 355,594 enrolled, there were in 1921-22 3,902 kindergartens with 397,610 enrolled, arriving at the year 1941-42 at 10,633 kindergartens with 755,489 enrolled (cf. La politica e la legislazione scolastica in Italia dal 1922 al 1943, Milan 1947, pp. 422-23). For rural kindergartens, v. SCUOLE RURALI. - See Pl. XVII.
Bibliography17 works
Nino Sammartano