Activism

ACTIVISM. - Active school, a., activity of the child, school of work are terms of which modern pedagogy makes very frequent use. By them is meant to indicate all that movement which, in the name of the freedom and spontaneity of the child, has intended and intends to transform the old traditional school, resting entirely, in the activist critique, on verbalism and on the passive adherence of the child to a knowledge that is only the fruit of the research and elaboration of the teacher and to which the child remains a stranger. If the word a. can be considered new, what it intends to signify goes back, at least in some principles, to the pedagogical tradition, from Plato to Pestalozzi; a tradition that has indeed not failed to pose the problem, which is identified with the very problem of method and of learning. A. starts from the principle that true education, true knowledge is that which we acquire not only starting from the center of our spirit, but also from our direct experience. The principle that everyone truly knows what he does is, in short, the creed on which all activist pedagogical thought is founded. The teacher who gives definitions or conclusions and who does not know how to awaken in the child a center of interests and who, through a whole particular action of researches and investigations, does not know how to guide him to the discovery of those definitions and conclusions or laws or principles, is a teacher who has taken from his pupils the best that school could give them, that is, the joy of being themselves, and of knowing themselves to be the discoverers of their own knowledge. Pedagogical a. moreover does not forget another principle, that the nature of the child is expressed entirely in doing and therefore his personality develops better through the work of the hands, direct observation, personal research. The eyes and the hands more than the ears contribute to learning, and experience teaches better than precepts.

I. PRECEDENTS

Now, without diminishing the importance of today's movement for new or active schools, in the pedagogical tradition from ancient to modern times one cannot say that an activistic principle is entirely lacking. Socrates, Plato, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, the pedagogists of the humanistic age — to embrace a long period of pedagogical thought — affirm principles of knowledge which, being entirely interior to man, presuppose in him, if they are to be realized and manifested, the whole interior activity of the pupil, without which his thought would remain hidden and unknown to itself. In ancient pedagogical thought, knowing is an act of the child's direct inquiry and therefore the fruit of his own personal conquest. Nor are happy intuitions lacking here and there in humanistic pedagogy, telling us how even in the fifteenth century our pedagogists had a clear vision of knowledge as the fruit of the child's interior elaboration. Intuitions that are found in P. P. Vergerio (v.), in Vegio (v.), in Palmieri (v.), in Alberti (v.). Vegio, for example, tells us that one learns better with the eyes than with the ears and that for children examples are needed, not precepts. Not to mention that in order to arouse interest in the class Vegio speaks of a teacher of his who liked to divide the class into two teams so that, through struggle and disputation, interest might better arise in the children along with noble emulation. A system that the Jesuits would later adopt in their school and that would give rise, with appropriate modern adaptations, to today's team or agonistic system (cf. M. Casotti, Didattica, Brescia 1938, p. 22 ff.). Already Alberti in the fifteenth century had identified education with the exercise of the spirit and the exercise of the hands; "by not writing, by not painting, you would never become a writer or a painter," says Alberti, a thought that Comenius would later repeat when he affirmed that one learns "to do by doing. The masters of mechanical art do not hold beginners back with fine theoretical lessons, but set them to work at once so that by building they may learn to build, by chiseling to sculpt, by painting to paint. In schools, therefore, boys must learn to write by writing, to speak by speaking, to reason by reasoning." Starting from the empirical principle that knowledge is acquired through the senses, Comenius suggests the "golden rule" that everything should as far as possible be presented to the senses: "visible things to sight, those that sound to hearing." Vico, further on, with the enunciation of his principle "verum et factum convertuntur," affirming that we know what we ourselves do, establishes that knowledge, our knowledge, can only be the fruit of our experience and our inquiry, and that outside these there is no true knowledge and no true cognition. These principles later in Rousseau are placed at the center of a great pedagogical system and posit knowledge as a conquest that the child's mind makes in contact with nature and its phenomena. Gian Giacomo will never give his Emile definitions, rules, precepts, conclusions; he will not properly teach him geography, astronomy, geometry, or physics; Emile will learn everything through his own experience, which will always arise from the particular interest he has come to take in this or that problem. There are no books in this school, because books speak from the outside while nature is grasped from within; in fact Emile will learn all the things that are necessary to him and that he can derive directly from his observation. The active school in Rousseau has virtually come into being. For it to be realized in the sense in which we now see it, it is enough to lead the pupil not from society to nature, but from nature to society; that is, to ensure that the environment in which the child must be educated and live becomes natural and not conventional, and that the principle be recognized that the mind, being active, has no need to receive notions but rather to produce them and arrive at conclusions. Pestalozzi took up the inheritance of the Genevan, realizing, more than anywhere else, in his institute at Yverdon, his educational ideal by ensuring that the pupils contributed to their mutual formation and developed in freedom. For «entrusted, indeed, up to a certain point, to themselves, they are generally cheerful; they are always at work, because life there is active whether one plays or works; that exuberance which is a privilege of their age is at every moment employed in exercises that strengthen and amuse at the same time» (cf. M. A. Julin, Esprit de la méthode d'éducation de Pestalozzi, Milan 1812, pp. 69-73 and passim). Pedagogical activism as it is commonly understood today is usually taken to begin in England in 1889 with Cecil Reddie's new school, of which more will be said below; but Lambruschini, De Sanctis, Gabelli, and St. John Bosco must not be forgotten here, who, aware of the truth of the principle that every piece of knowledge is truly ours when it is discovered by us, sought, even if by different methods, to apply in their school activity or in their pedagogical systems a type of school that could not be called anything other than active. In his school at S. Cerbone, Lambruschini (v.) did not fail to occupy his young pupils with agricultural and gardening work, to entrust them with responsibility for spending a modest sum. He taught geometry with solids, numeration with grains of wheat, and the natural sciences in the midst of nature. If one then considers that the pupils of S. Cerbone came to compile a handwritten newspaper, the Aurora, which exchanged with the other, Il Miettore, of the school at Meleto of Marquis Cosimo Ridolfi, it becomes clear how Lambruschini was attempting a school which, understood as a community, produced knowledge not from a cold repetition of notions but from a continuous and active inquiry to be kept alive by the experimental method (cf. A. Gambaro, Schizzo biografico di R. Lambruschini, Turin 1939, passim). De Sanctis was conscious of the pedagogical value of the child's activity not only when he sought to realize in his «second school» the plan of associating the young with his work «and making each lesson the product of a collective labor», but also when, recalling the school of Puoti, he extols its method, which he calls Socratic and which could be called active. «The best teacher — De Sanctis thinks — is the one who thinks least of appearing himself and lets the young do the work, dissimulating his own role and creating in them this illusion that what they learn is they themselves who have found it. What we retain is what we have acquired by the sweat of our brow; all the rest easily enters and more easily leaves the memory». And he called Pasquale Villari into the matter in this regard, lamenting that the eminent historian, then Minister of Public Education, recommended these practical exercises, such as were used in the school of Puoti, on the example of England, whereas he could easily have found them in the school from which Villari himself had come. Another pedagogue who resolves his experimental vision of the school into an active method is Aristide Gabelli, who had ideas that, if not profound, were clear, and saw the school in the function of a formative school, possible of realization only if put in a position to abandon the stale bookish and mnemonic methods and hold fast to experience, observation, and inquiry, which alone could contribute, by arousing fervor, love, and interest in the pupils, to forming what the school must and alone can give, the «instrument head», as Gabelli himself says.

All this says that the activistic method arises on the trunk of an ancient tradition. The negativity of the teacher — the so-called negativity — as it appears to us in Socrates, in St. Augustine, and in Rousseau, cannot be understood unless one thinks of an activity entirely placed in the child, that is, in the other term of the educational relationship. In today's pedagogy, the activistic has become conscious of itself, in the sense that it has more attentively placed the child at the center of the school, the recognized author of his own knowledge. It is understood that this process of acquiring knowledge made autonomous cannot deny — as one might erroneously think — indeed it requires the presence and positive action of the teacher, who is a teacher insofar as, recognizing the limits to his action, he better knows how to promote and respect the spontaneity and the freedom of the child. Once the period of the pedagogical spiritualism of the Risorgimento was over, Herbartianism on the one hand and positivism on the other stiffened the nature of the child into preconceived formulas and schemes, mortifying all its spirituality in an empiricist didacticism. But, toward the end of the last century, Rousseau, Pestalozzi and Fröbel broke through the meshes of the "thick curtain" in which Herbartianism and, even more, positivism had enveloped pedagogy, and returned to fertilize the new pedagogy, now stripped of whatever, especially in the first of them, was either paradox or the insufficiency of a sound religious vision.

II. ACTIVISM IN ENGLAND

Of the active schools as they came to be established in Europe and America over the last half-century, the first manifestations occurred in England. In fact, in 1889, at Abbotsholme near Derbyshire, Dr. Cecil Reddie founded the first school attended by children from 11 to 18 years of age. From Reddie's school there later came, in 1893, Dr. Haden Badley (b. 1865), who at Bedales in Sussex (southern England) founded a mixed boarding school.

It seemed to Reddie that the old school no longer responded to the necessities and needs of modern life; a school in which dead languages are taught seemed to him useless for the demands of present life; indeed a waste of time, since the young know nothing of all that concerns modern life: the practice of things and their relations with society. These are highly debatable assertions, because one would first of all need to know what the school must prepare for, and whether the classical languages, which Reddie calls dead languages, truly make no contribution at all to the formation of the man. Even the system of games seemed to Reddie to need reform, because "athletic overload," he said, "is no less real than classical overload." The whole school still seemed to him to be without a function of its own, entirely bent toward higher university education. The task of the school is to prepare the child for life. To this end the school environment must not be conventional but practical, in the sense that it must prepare for life and not deny it. Reddie's and Badley's schools were set up in the countryside; the children there lived a free life in an environment more familial than scholastic. The knowledge of these children, arising from participation in communal life, had as subjects of instruction modern languages, the sciences, and manual work.

Also to be remembered in England are the experiments of Landerson and O'Neill. The former promoted in his Oundle School (Northamptonshire) the spirit of cooperation and personal inquiry; the latter created in his school at Kearsley, in Lancashire, a type of free school with free timetables, with manual work, where the teacher acts more as a guide than as an instructor.

III. ACTIVISM IN FRANCE

The new schools began with Edmond Demolins (1852-1907), who aimed to develop the personality of the child through his Ecole des Roches (1899), so called from the locality in which it stood, the property of the Roches in Normandy.

Demolins's school takes in children and young people from 6 to 20 years of age and is set in open countryside so that the children may not only move about, be and feel free, but may also live in a world full of fresh cheerfulness. The children do not live in a single building but, so that the school may better realize family life, are distributed, in numbers of 25 to 35, among separate houses, each at a distance from the others, well, though soberly, furnished. The pupils themselves attend to the household chores. In this school, while the development of the child's personality is the aim, preparation for public examinations is not neglected. In the afternoon hours the children are occupied with games, sport, and manual work. The older children have the care of the younger ones. Experience and direct observation in Demolins's school are always placed before lessons or theoretical study. It cannot be said that the Ecole des Roches gave rise in France to a scholastic renewal in the activist sense. Demolins's example remained rather an isolated case.

Nevertheless, two other educational initiatives that fall within the vision of the active school are to be remembered. The orphanage of Cempuis (Oise), founded by Paul Robin and his collaborators, which lasted from 1880 to 1894, and which based the entire formation of the pupils on their spontaneous initiative, and the group entitled la Nouvelle éducation, headed by Dr. Roger Cousinet.

Cousinet's method is called that of work in teams, travail par équipes. In this method the children gather in groups of 5 or 6 and choose and organize their work as they do their games. The work chosen is carried out in collaboration; each member of the team will bring his own contribution to the common work. The victory of the group is the victory of each one. Apart from the interest that this competitive method arouses in the pupils, it educates them to solidarity and morally leads the children to overcome their own selfishness.

IV. ACTIVISM IN GERMANY

The first realization of an active school occurred in 1898 through the work of Dr. Hermann Lietz, who founded his first school at Ilsenburg. Lietz (1869-1919) had done his training at Abbotsholme. Lietz's first school was intended for children from 7 to 12 years old; this school was followed by two others: that of Haubinda in Thuringia (1901), for children from 12 to 16 years old, and that of Bieberstein near Fulda (1904) for young people from 16 to 20 years old.

Lietz's plan, as Ferrière illustrates it to us (in Trois pionniers de l'éducation nouvelle, Paris 1928, p. 47), is that of "joining what is good in the scientific school with a life of affection and intimacy like that of the family; offering young people the opportunity to exercise a free activity and to devote themselves to healthy work in the countryside, and finally creating school communities within which characters can blossom freely and individually outside of any external constraint." Lietz's schools are called "Rural Education Homes" (Landerziehungsheime). Two other German innovators draw near to Lietz: Gustav Wyneken, founder in 1906 of the Freie Schulgemeinde (free school community), and Paul Geheeb, founder first, in 1910, of the school L'Odentoval and then, in Geneva and Fribourg, of L'école de l'humanité. Wyneken exasperates the Rousseauian principles of education, advocating the absolute freedom of the child who educates himself outside the family, the school, and the authority of adults. The children provide for their own instruction and education. Wyneken's attempt and that of others who followed in his footsteps was bound, as was to be expected, to flow into a vague and indistinct need for escape from the school and from traditional bourgeois life, without, however, producing anything truly wholesome.

An experiment, on the other hand, worthy of great note in the same Germany is that of Georg Kerschensteiner with his work school, in which children must, through work, develop a sense of initiative and personal experience.

Work in Kerschensteiner's school is practical; it aims at "accustoming pupils to work with absolute precision according to models to which the finished work must fully correspond. To measure, weigh, work with attention, objectively check the product of the work according to the concept of activity directed toward a well-defined end, that is, toward a production that has an intrinsic value" (G. Gaspari, Educazione e lavoro in Kerschensteiner, Florence 1940). A value that is morality, in the sense that not every work is educational, but only when the abilities and the qualities created by it are at the service of real values. "Education must never forget," says Kerschensteiner in his Concetto della scuola del lavoro (Italian trans., Florence 1935, p. 46 ff.), "that wherever it demands work, such a demand cannot neglect the possibility of a complete capacity for the production of objective value." A work, in other words, outside the purpose of moral formation is not work, but merely technical ability that remains outside the personality and therefore devoid of objective value, that is, of morality. This end is achieved by bringing the child close to work as the best act he can perform for his own good and for that of the community in which he is inserted. The school must therefore be organized, as Lietz and Dewey wish, whom Kerschensteiner studied, as a work community. And because the school is to educate children in self-government, it is appropriate that the children themselves organize the life of their small community democratically, so that this may truly prepare them for the great community of which they will be part tomorrow.

V. ACTIVISM IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

The particular industrial and social conditions of America are better suited to the flourishing of a new education. The champion of the new schools in America is John Dewey.

Dewey notes, first of all, how the school, by detaching the child from his natural environment, which is society, becomes abstract and bookish. The child must actively participate in the work of the school through the environment, that is, the real situation in which he lives, which he must feel as an element that he invests with his activity in order to feel it and make it his own. The particular and foremost task of the school is that it educate pupils to think, and in order that they may develop the capacity to think it is necessary that there be an activity that interests them. To overcome the current state of indiscipline in the school — indiscipline in the sense that children remain estranged from a knowledge in which they do not participate, because it has been posed as a problem of others and not their own, and because there should be no break between school and life — beyond the interest by which children must be attracted, it is necessary that there be a stimulus to thinking and that the children feel responsible for the regular unfolding of the solutions suggested and that they be able to test them with the application, so as to discern clearly their meaning and discover for themselves their validity. Children must be educated to sociality. Play, work, gardening exercises and various other kinds of work are useful, but they are not educational if they are performed as a repetition of acts. In this case they are mechanical reproductions and therefore do not educate. Every form of mechanicalness, of play and of combined work must be banished from the school, if we want it to be formative of the whole personality of the child; interest, and therefore education, is born from the process that the material offers us from the raw state to that of perfection. Gardening, for example, is not interesting insofar as it instructs in the technique of sowing and gathering certain products, but insofar as it serves to attain a higher knowledge of a superior intellectual order. The sciences in fact had their development gradually from the useful occupations of men, and the school is truly active when it brings it about that its subjects of instruction are connected in such a way that the spirit feels them as its own conquest, that is, as an act of its formation. The humanism that Dewey envisages is not the one that is born from letters, or at least it is not only that, but it is the one that is born in any case from the interest that, through doing, the mind brings to bear in order to liberate intelligence and to enrich the spirit with further conquests. In Dewey's conception there are not, on the one hand, liberal studies and, on the other, utilitarian studies. The former must meet with the latter in the sense that, just as a liberal education would be vain if it did not arise from an inner need and from the spirit's participation in culture, so too would a knowledge of practical notions be vain if it remained mere notions, without blending and finding unity in the fundamental spiritual life in which alone they can live. The subjects of instruction are studied as the situations of life offer them to us. And in order that the situations be real and interest the child, Dewey made use of the tendency that is proper to the child, that is, play, which must become the center of his whole life. The play that Dewey advocates might be called social, in the sense that the children are called to a play that engages them socially, in common. Play as the social activity of children is at the basis of the kindergarten as of the other levels of school. Thus if in the nursery school the object of play can be, for example, a doll, in the elementary school it can be history, geography, the sciences, which, felt and studied in close connection with real situations, offer a great possibility of interests and educational suggestions. The new pedagogical movement promoted by Dewey found an interpreter in America in William Heard Kilpatrick (b. 1871).

Other proponents of the active school in America are Angelo Patri, of Italian origin (b. at Piaggine [Salerno] in 1876), who advocates the requirement that the child think and work with joy. Patri aims at the concrete formation of the child's personality not through the mnemonic learning of information, but through the child's participation in life and in the reality of nature. Among Patri's writings, mention should be made of A Schoolmaster of a Great City (1917), School and Home (1925), Problems of Childhood (1926).

The active school found in America another fervent supporter in Carleton Wolsey Washburne, b. at Chicago in 1889. The renovated schools of Winnetka, a suburb of Chicago, are his work. Washburne is the author of various pedagogical-didactic works.

A synthesis of his thought is in his Living Philosophy of Education (New York 1940). In Washburne's school the system of classes or groups is replaced by that of free groupings, which allows each pupil to proceed freely in his school curriculum. The schools of Winnetka must strive, as Washburne himself says, "to be the centers in which children live happily, in which they have freedom to create, to live in society, to express themselves as children, and where, at the same time, they are prepared in a complete and scientific way to participate in the life that surrounds them"; therefore the program is divided into two clearly distinct parts. One comprises the knowledge and techniques by means of which we seek to obtain a common level in all pupils, the other is composed of stimuli, of occasions provided with a view to a creative work that interests the community. The school wants to attain a goal that is common to all, but since children are differently endowed with intelligence, a method has been devised that makes it possible for every intelligence to arrive at that result according to its own ability. This result comprises three levels. Once the objectives to be attained have been established precisely, these can be attained by every normal child. For children below normality there is a modified program; for all the others it is required that they attain all the objectives set. The material in these schools has been conceived so as to be self-educational. The child at every level of study proceeds on his own. Having completed a level, he passes to the next. He corrects on his own his daily work and his placement tests, which are tests by which the existence or non-existence of certain aptitudes can be checked. The control tests placed at the child's disposal are conceived in such a way as to refer the child back to the corrective exercises that are necessary for him to remedy the gaps brought to light by these tests. The pupil who has failed a test carries out the practical work indicated, then submits to the same test, presented in another form. This work of acquiring knowledge and technique occupies half of the pupil's morning and half of the afternoon, and is individual work. The other parts of the morning and afternoon are left free for the exercise of collective and creative activities. The classroom in which the child works is in accordance with the age of the children with which he can best group himself. This creative activity comprises the critical hearing of music, the critical study of art and literature, the life of the playground, the editing and illustration, etc., of the pupils' newspaper. The purpose of this collective activity is not that of acquiring knowledge but rather that of creating in children a social conscience; this is why an attempt is made to present human work in a social framework. Two organizations form part of the school organization of Winnetka: the research section and the advisory section for education. The first looks to general school problems, the second is a laboratory of child guidance, where the physician, the psychiatrist and the teacher indicate, each following his own investigations, which methods and procedures can be adopted for each child.

Another American initiative, again within the general framework of the active school, is the Dalton-laboratory-Plan, due to the American educator Helen Parkhurst (b. 1889), who in 1914 attended the courses of Maria Montessori, by whose method she was influenced. From 1911 to 1913 in Dalton, an American town, Parkhurst conducted the experiment of transforming the school by adapting it to the individual work of each pupil. Parkhurst later continued this experiment in New York.

The Parkhurst method concerns children from the age of 10 upwards and starts from the premise that children must live at school freely as in their own homes. It is not the teachers who must give notions and information; the pupils begin their own personal research, and the teachers help them, giving them suggestions and advice, indicating the readings to be done and choosing them from the class library. In the Dalton Plan system, pupils are not bound to their class, either with regard to the program or with regard to time. When a pupil has completed the program of a class, at any moment of the year, he moves on to the next class. It follows from this that the classrooms are not for a class, but for a subject (laboratory). The pupils are assigned the month's task (20 days), divided by subjects into units of work. The pupils are free to organize their work. The teachers have the task of advising them and checking their work. The working day is divided into various periods: the one dedicated to work (laboratory period), the one reserved for guiding the pupils (organization period), and the one reserved for instruction (conference period). In the Dalton Plan, individual work and common class work meet, because, according to the nature of the work, the children can work either individually or in groups. Individual and group work must be understood in the sense that every activity of the pupils is a little of the one and a little of the other, and while one works by himself, his work fits in and is a moment of the work of the others. Not uniformity of work, but differentiation of work with a view to a common goal. Parkhurst illustrated her method in the work: Educazione sul piano Dalton (London 1922).

VI. ACTIVISM IN ITALY

The active school found its impetus in the pedagogy of Maria Montessori. Montessori, studying the methods for the education of deficient children, became persuaded that, while these methods "had nothing special in the instruction of idiots, applied to normal children they would develop their personality in a wonderful, surprising way" (M. Montessori, Il metodo della pedagogia scientifica applicata alla educazione infantile nelle case dei bambini, Rome 1909, p. 27).

The child in his development, Montessori thinks, encounters countless obstacles; he must be freed from these obstacles and helped to live. The adult must change his method toward the child. The child must be left free to manifest himself and to unfold. But "the environment" in which the child lives is out of proportion to his strength and his little hands; the environment therefore constitutes for the child an impediment to the manifesting and unfolding of his activity. To this end, an environment proportioned to the nature and the state of children must be created, an environment that will permit for the child to be able to «realize an ordered activity that tends to achieve reasonable goals» (M. Montessori, Manuale di pedagogia scientifica, Naples 1935, p. 5 ff.). The environment in which the child lives must not interpose itself as an obstacle between the child and the environment itself, because the environment contains the means of development. It is no longer the teacher who educates; she does not have a properly positive function of formation and education, but of mediation between the environment and the child. It is the child who is active, because it is the child who must know how to choose the means with which to exercise himself; the teacher's function consists in giving him the capacity for choice, organizing the work suited to the society in which the child lives. «The most important objects of the environment — says Montessori (op. cit., p. 63) — are those that lend themselves to systematic exercises of the senses and of the intelligence, with a harmonious collaboration of the whole psychic and moral personality of the child; and that little by little lead him to conquer, with exuberant and powerful energy, the hardest fundamental learnings of culture: such as reading, writing, singing». The «material, fixed in Montessori's schools, is, in its entirety, a systematic instrument of psychology that can be compared to a gymnastic training ground of the spirit, where the child, exercising himself spontaneously, progresses in his development and therefore also in the acquisition of culture» (Montessori, op. cit., p. 65). The materials prepared and arranged by the teacher, always placed within the children's reach, are freely chosen by them according to their needs. The teacher intervenes only in the case where she sees the child in need of advice. She must moreover establish the average correspondence between the individual objects and the child's age. On this fact is founded the practical capacity to recognize, from the children's reactions, the useful or productive acts from those that instead disperse energies «in order to be able to direct with certainty and help the admirable ensemble of little workers, concentrated in their work». The older children can perform other tasks such as gardening, work in the fields, etc. The «Case dei bambini» arose in Rome around 1906, when the Istituto dei beni stabili resolved to gather the children, from three to seven years old, of the tenants of the large tenements, in a room, under the guidance of a teacher. The «Case dei bambini» spread widely, both in Rome and here and there in all parts of the world. Montessori's method has certainly had more followers outside than inside the peninsula. Italy, certainly a country of more ancient civilization and of more tested culture, perhaps perceived in the Montessori method the limit that, despite the undeniable fervor by which it is pervaded, prevents it from rising toward a superior pedagogy. The environment and the material end up in Montessori attracting all attention to themselves, causing that living element, that real person who is the child, to escape. The education of the senses, certainly good in itself, remains insufficient if it is not translated into an interior knowledge, valid not for the purposes of feeling and seeing, but of understanding and judging. The whole pedagogical act cannot be exhausted in the education of the senses; this can be a means to that higher education which is moral and intellectual. The vaunted freedom on which the «Casa dei bambini» is founded remains compromised when one thinks — as some have thought — that the purely mechanical conception of development, as gymnastics of the organs, carried out with the help of specially chosen apparatus, bears within itself the imprint of passivity, so much in contrast with Montessori's affirmation (cf. S. Hessen, Fondamenti della pedagogia come filosofia applicata, Palermo 1937, p. 126 ff.). Not to mention that that environment of the «Casa» which wishes to proclaim the freedom of the children ends up circumscribing it, limiting it, inasmuch as it encloses the whole action of the child within those limits that the environment itself interposes. Despite this incapacity of the Montessori method to overcome the particularism and mechanism implicit in it, and to raise the school toward an ideal unity of human formation, the programs for the elementary school of 1923 and those for the method schools for maternal education did not fail to welcome elements of Montessori pedagogy.

Among the attempts at active schools in Italy, one must also remember the rural schools of La Montesca and of Rovigliano of L. and A. Franchetti, who opened at La Montesca the first Montessori nursery school, and the «Scuola rinnovata» of Giuseppina Pizzigoni (b. 1870) at the Ghisolfa, a working-class neighborhood of Milan. Pizzigoni's school, erected into a moral entity in 1927, consists of an eight-year elementary course; in it the official program of the elementary schools is carried out, but the freedom and activity of the pupils are respected, in the sense that the teacher's lesson does not exhaust the whole school, the pupils' action preceding the teacher's lesson. Gardening, play, life in the open air, workshop work, excursions have the greatest importance in this school. Pizzigoni has illustrated her method in some writings, among which may be remembered: Linee fondamentali e programmi della scuola rinnovata secondo il metodo sperimentale (Milan 1927) and Il lavoro delle cinque classi elementari della scuola rinnovata di Milano (ibid. 1940).

Other experiments in active schools in Italy, even if with limited influence, have not been lacking; one must remember those of Giovanni Cena (v.) in the Agro Romano, of Alessandro Marcucci and others in the schools of the «Associazione per gli interessi del mezzogiorno» and of the «Ente nazionale di cultura di Firenze». Within the framework of the active school one must also see the Mompiano nursery school of the Agazzi sisters. Perhaps more than Montessori's, the Agazzi nursery school corresponds to the needs of the Italian conscience. The Agazzian nursery school founds the education of children on spontaneity and on doing. The children in the nursery school find an environment suited to their conditions; they attend directly to all the needs of common life, cleanliness, order of the environment, vegetable garden, gardening, bathing; the older ones help the younger ones in their needs; singing, music, spontaneous drawing, everything contributes to making, free of all artifice, the child's life joyful and to promoting his physical, intellectual and moral development. In the Agazzian nursery school the material, chosen with so much care and on the basis of scientific criteria in the Montessori school, has nothing special or refined about it; it is constituted and prepared by the teacher and the pupils; everything can serve to enrich the school museum: a print, a plant, a fossil, a worked object, etc.

Another experiment to remember is the «Scuola-città Pestalozzi» which, promoted by Ernesto Codignola, was opened in Florence in 1945, in the premises of a municipal school. «It is centered — writes Codignola himself in one of his publications from which many of the notices reported here have been drawn (Le scuole nuove e i loro problemi, Florence n.d.) — on the concept that it must be the very organization of collective life in all its manifold aspects that spontaneously educates to social and moral discipline and to knowledge. It wishes to be a collectivity that educates itself for self-government, learning the exercise of freedom by spontaneously submitting to its own law. More than a school in the traditional sense of the word, it wishes to be a community of work in which all, in turn, participate in all aspects of collective life, from the humblest duties to the highest».

The so-called "Cities" or "Boys' Villages" are founded on this same principle, of which Father E. J. Flanagan gave the example; the most notable is that of S. Marinella, founded and directed by Don Antonio Rivolta. The "Boys' Village" gathers a considerable number (around a hundred) of young boys whom the war had led astray, drawing them away from the discipline of the family and leading them to live in the street with all the seductions and moral dangers that it presented in the great cities immediately after the war. The young people, generally between the ages of 12 and 18, live in the village freely. Their education must not arise from precepts, but from the very organization of communal life. The village is a true community: justice, the bank, sanitation, the police, and the most diverse trades are exercised by the young people themselves. In the village, participation in the administration of the village and in the exercise of justice is reached through regular elections. Every day in the assembly, which gathers all the citizens, the problems that concern the community are discussed. The boys live in the village on the fruit of their own labor. Work, whatever it may be, is paid with a currency that circulates within the village. With the proceeds of their own labor (the currency is called "merits") the boys satisfy all their needs: food, lodging, etc. Whenever the boys wish to go outside the village, they can change their "merits" into lire at the exchange office of the local bank according to the value of the day. There is no doubt about the educational value of this education if one considers that it is a matter of educating to self-government children previously led astray and given over to vice. The organization found ready imitation elsewhere.

VI. To complete this picture of the active school, two more names must be remembered, that of Decroly and that of Ferrière.

Dr. Ovide Decroly (1871-1932) was led — like Montessori — to the study of pedagogical problems by the contact he had in the clinic of Brussels with deficient children. Decroly wished to apply to normal children the same systems as those used for abnormal ones. In 1907 he opened in Brussels the École de l'Érmitage, so called from the street in which it arose. Decroly starts from the principle that for the child to learn, interest must arise in him. Children have, in general terms, the same interests that the first men had: to feed themselves, to defend themselves, to struggle against obstacles and enemies, to work. These are the centers of interest common to children. Therefore these criteria in the first four classes of Decroly's school are set as central and fundamental motives, as trunks from which a whole series of cognitions and notions can branch out. Around these centers of interest works the activity of the child, driven to research by the interest that arises in him from that central theme. Decroly aimed to develop in children the spirit of observation, which, united with the need to collect, meant that the children themselves could contribute to enriching the teaching material. Then, through small trips and through the interest that the children come to take in current events, whereby their attention is drawn to facts that would otherwise remain outside their experience, a school is realized whose fundamental motive for its existence is interest. Besides the centers of interest, Decroly affirmed, for the purposes of learning to read, the global method, of which, moreover, in the nineteenth century, our Lambrouchini had spoken, who started from the elementary principle that the child learns to read as he learned to speak, that is, receiving the word as a unit and not in its syllabic decomposition. Decroly, who was in 1914 a lecturer in pedagogy at the Institut supérieur de Buls Temps in Brussels, is the author of various pedagogical works among which should be remembered Vers l'école renoocée (in collaboration with Gérard Boon, Paris-Brussels 1921); La fonction de globalisation et l'enseignement (ibid. 1929); Études de psychogéné (ibid. 1932); Comment l'enfant arrive à parler (ibid. 1934).

Adolphe Ferrière, to whom reference was made above, is the other pedagogue who became a champion of the active school in Europe. Ferrière was born in Geneva in 1879. His work joins that carried out by other Swiss pedagogues such as Bovet, Claparède, Piaget. Ferrière senses the spiritual richness that lives within the child and advocates a school in which the child is placed in a condition to affirm himself as spontaneity and freedom. In 1899 Ferrière founded the Bureau international des écoles Bruxelles, which lasted until 1925, and in 1926 the Bureau international de l'éducation. In 1921 the Ligne internationale pour l'éducation nouvelle was founded at Calais.

(di A. Ferrière), in La scuola attiva di A. Ferrière, trad. ital., Firenze 1929; E. Huguenin, A. Ferrière, in L'Education, 1936; A. Renard, La pédagogie et la philosophie de l'Ecole nouvelle d'après l'œuvre d'A. Ferrière, Parigi 1941.

Nino Sammartano