ATTIVISMO

ACTIVISM. – Active school, active learning, child activity, work school are terms frequently used in modern pedagogy. They refer to that movement which, in the name of the child’s freedom and spontaneity, has sought—and continues to seek—to transform the old traditional school, which, in activist criticism, is based on verbalism and the child’s passive acceptance of knowledge that is merely the result of the teacher’s research and elaboration and to which the child remains a stranger.

While the word itself may be new, what it signifies goes back, at least in some principles, to the pedagogical tradition from Plato to Pestalozzi; a tradition that has indeed not failed to address the problem, which is identical with the problem of method and learning itself. Activism is founded on the principle that true education and true knowledge are those which we acquire not only from the center of our spirit but also from our direct experience. The principle that one truly knows what one does is, in short, the creed upon which all activist pedagogical thought is based.

A teacher who merely gives definitions or conclusions, who fails to arouse in the child a center of interest and, through a particular process of research and investigation, does not guide the child to discover those definitions, conclusions, laws, or principles for himself, is a teacher who has deprived his pupils of the best the school could offer them: the joy of being themselves and of knowing themselves as the discoverers of their own knowledge.

Moreover, pedagogical activism does not overlook another principle: that the nature of the child is fully expressed in doing, and that his personality develops best through manual work, direct observation, and personal inquiry. Eyes and hands contribute more to learning than ears, and experience teaches better than precepts.

I. PRECEDENTS

Even in humanist pedagogy, there are scattered insights that reveal how, as early as the fifteenth century, pedagogues had a clear vision of knowledge as the fruit of the child’s inner elaboration. Such insights are found in P.P. Vergerio (v.), Vegio (v.), PALMIRA (v.), Alberti (v.).

Vegio, for instance, tells us that we learn better with our eyes than with our ears and that children need examples rather than precepts. He even describes how, to arouse interest in his pupils, his own teacher divided the class into two teams so that, through noble emulation in debate and contest, the children’s interest would be sparked. This system was later adopted by the Jesuits in their schools and, with modern adaptations, gave rise to the current team or competitive system (cf. M. Casotti, *Didattica*, Brescia 1938, pp. 22 ff.). As early as the fifteenth century, Alberti had recognized education in the exercise of the mind and the exercise of the hands; he wrote that one would never become a writer or painter without writing or painting, a thought he would later repeat. Comenius echoed this when he stated that we learn to do by doing. Masters of mechanical arts do not retain apprentices with fine theoretical lectures but immediately set them to work so that, by making, they learn to make, by carving, to carve, and by painting, to paint. Thus, in schools too, children must learn to write by writing, to speak by speaking, and to reason by reasoning. Starting from the empirical principle that we acquire knowledge through the senses, Comenius suggests the golden rule that everything possible should be presented to the senses: “visible things to sight, audible things to hearing.”

Vico, going further, with his principle *verum et factum convertuntur*, affirmed that we know what we ourselves make, establishing that knowledge, our knowledge, can only be the fruit of our experience and inquiry, and that outside of these there is no true knowledge or understanding. These principles later became central to Rousseau’s great pedagogical system, presenting knowledge as the conquest that the child’s mind achieves through contact with nature and its phenomena. Gian

As he will never give his EMILIO definitions, rules, precepts, or conclusions, nor will he teach him geography, astronomy, geometry, or physics as such; EMILIO will learn everything through his own experience, which will always arise from the particular interest he has taken 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, EMILIO will learn all the things he needs and can derive directly from his own observation. The active school, as envisaged by Rousseau, has virtually come into being. For it to be realized in the way we now see it, the pupil must be led not from society to nature, but from nature to society; in other words, the environment in which the child is to be educated and live must become natural rather than conventional, and the principle must be recognized that the mind, being active, does not need to receive knowledge so much as to produce it and arrive at conclusions. Pestalozzi took up the inheritance of the Genevan, realizing, more than anyone else, in his institute at Iverdon, his educational ideal by making the pupils contribute to one another’s formation and develop in freedom. For “entrusted, as it were, to themselves up to a certain point, they are generally cheerful; they are always at work, whether playing or working, because life there is active; that exuberance which is the privilege of their age is at every moment employed in exercises that both strengthen and amuse them” (cf. M. A. Julin, *Esprit de la méthode d’éducation de Pestalozzi*, Milan 1812, pp. 69–73 and passim).

The pedagogical ideal as commonly understood today is usually traced back in England to 1889 with the New School of Cecil Reddie, of which more will be said later; but we must not forget here LAMBRUSCHINI, DE SANCTIS, GABELLI, and ST JOHN BOSCO, who, aware of the truth of the principle that all knowledge is truly ours only when we discover it ourselves, sought—even if by different methods—to apply in their school practice or pedagogical systems a type of school that can only be called active. In his school at S. CERBONE, LAMBRUSCHINI (v.) did not fail to occupy his young pupils with agricultural and gardening work, entrusting them with the responsibility of managing a modest sum of money. He taught geometry with coins, counting with grains of wheat, and natural sciences amid nature itself. If we consider further that the pupils of S. CERBONE went so far as to compile a handwritten newspaper, *L’Aurora*, which exchanged issues with *Il Mietitore* from the school of Meleto run by Marquis Cosimo Ridolfi, it becomes clear how LAMBRUSCHINI attempted a school that, understood as a community, produced knowledge not through the cold repetition of notions but through continuous and active inquiry kept alive by the experimental method (cf. A. Gambaro, *Schizzo biografico di R. Lambruschini*, Turin 1939, passim).

DE SANCTIS thus recognized 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 collective labor,” but also when, recalling the school of PUOTI, he extolled its method, which he called Socratic and which could be described as active. “The best teacher,” DE SANCTIS thought, “is the one who thinks least of showing off and lets the young do the work, distinguishing his role and creating in them the illusion that what they learn they have discovered themselves. What we acquire with the sweat of our brow stays with us; all the rest easily enters and more easily leaves the memory.” And on this point he invoked Pasquale Villari, lamenting that the eminent historian, then Minister of Public Instruction, recommended these practical exercises, such as were used in PUOTI’s school on the English model, even though he could have found them in the very school from which Villari himself had graduated.

Another educationalist who resolved his experimental vision of the school into an active method was ARISTIDE GABELLI, who had ideas that, if not profound, were clear, and saw the school as a formative institution that could only be realized if it abandoned bookish and mnemonic methods in favor of experience, observation, and inquiry—these alone could, by arousing enthusiasm, love, and interest in the pupils, help form what the school must and can give: the “tool of the mind,” as GABELLI himself put II.
All this shows that the activistic method rests on an ancient tradition. The negativism of the teacher—the so-called negativism—as we see it in SOCRATES, ST AUGUSTINE, and ROUSSEAU, must not be understood as an activity entirely placed in the child, that is, in the other term of the educational relationship. In modern pedagogy, the pedagogical ideal has become conscious of itself in the sense that it has more carefully placed the child at the center of the school as the recognized author of his own knowledge. It is clear that this process of acquiring knowledge autonomously cannot, as might be mistakenly thought, deny—in fact, it requires—the presence and positive action of the teacher, who is a teacher precisely insofar as, recognizing the limits of his role, he better knows how to promote and respect the spontaneity and freedom of the child. After the period of spiritualist pedagogy during the Risorgimento, Herbartianism on one side and positivism on the other rigidified the nature of the child into preconceived formulas and schemes, stifling all his spirituality in an empiricist didacticism. But toward the end of the last century, ROUSSEAU, PESTALOZZI, and FRÖBEL broke the meshes of the continuous error in which Herbartianism and, more so, positivism had enveloped pedagogy, and they returned to fertilize the new pedagogy, now stripped of what, especially in the first, was paradoxical or insufficient in a sound religious vision.

II. THE ACTIVE METHOD IN ENGLAND

It seemed to Reddie that the old school no longer responded to the needs and requirements of modern life; a school in which dead languages were taught seemed useless to the demands of present life; indeed, a waste of time, since it left young people ignorant of everything concerning modern life: the practice of things and their relations with society. These assertions are highly debatable, for one would first need to know what the school should prepare students for, and whether classical languages—which Reddie calls dead languages—truly contribute nothing to the formation of the individual. Even the system of games seemed to Reddie in need of reform, since he claimed that "athletic overload" was no less real than classical overload. The entire school, in his view, lacked a clear function, being entirely geared toward higher university education. The task of the school, he argued, is to prepare the child for life. The school environment, to this end, should not be conventional but practical, in the sense that it must prepare for life rather than deny II. Reddie’s and Badley’s schools were situated in the countryside; the children lived a free life in an environment that was more familial than scholastic. The knowledge of these children arose from participation in common life, and the subjects taught were modern languages, sciences, and manual work.

Also worth recalling in England are the experiments of Landerson and O’Neill. The former, in his Oundle School (Northamptonshire), promoted a spirit of cooperation and personal inquiry, while the latter created in his school at Kearsly, Lancashire, a type of free school with flexible schedules and manual work, where the teacher acted more as a guide than as an instructor.

III. THE MOVEMENT IN FRANCE

Demolins’s school accommodated boys and young men from ages 6 to 20 and was situated in the countryside so that the children could move freely, feel unconstrained, and live in an atmosphere of fresh joy. The children did not live in a single building but, to better approximate family life, were distributed in groups of 25 to 35 into separate houses, spaced apart and furnished simply but adequately. The students themselves attended to household chores. While the school aimed to develop the child’s personality, it did not neglect preparation for public examinations. In the afternoons, the children engaged in games, sports, and manual work. The older boys had responsibility for the younger ones. At the *École des Roches*, direct experience and observation always took precedence over lessons or theoretical study. The *École des Roches* cannot be said to have sparked in France a renewal of schooling in the activist sense. Demolins’s example remained rather an isolated case.

Nevertheless, two other educational initiatives aligned with the vision of the *école active* are worth noting: the orphanage at Cempuis (Oise), founded by Paul Robin and his collaborators (1880–1894), which based all student formation on their spontaneous initiative, and the group known as *La Nouvelle Éducation*, led by Dr. Roger Cousinet.

Cousinet’s method is called the *travail par équipes* (teamwork method). In this approach, students work in groups of five or six, choosing and organizing their tasks as they would their games. The chosen work is carried out collaboratively; each member contributes to the common effort. The group’s success is the success of each individual. Beyond the competitive interest this method arouses in students, it fosters solidarity and, morally, helps children overcome selfishness.

IV. THE MOVEMENT IN GERMANY

As Ferrière describes Lietz’s plan (*Trois pionniers de l’éducation nouvelle*, Paris 1928, p. 47), it aimed “to combine what is good in the scientific school with a life of affection and intimacy akin to the family; to offer young people the opportunity for free activity and healthy work in the countryside; and finally, to create school communities in which character could develop freely and individually, free from any external constraint.” Lietz’s schools were called *Landerziehungsheime* (country education homes). Two other German innovators joined Lietz: Gustav Wyneken, who in 1906 founded the *Freie Schulgemeinde* (Free School Community), and Paul Geheeb, who first established the Odenwald School in 1910 and later, in Geneva and Freiburg, the *École de l’Humanité*.

Wyneken exaggerated the Rousseauist principles of education, advocating the absolute freedom of the child, who was to be educated outside the family, school, and adult authority. The children were to provide for their own instruction and education. As might have been expected, Wyneken’s attempt, and those of others who followed his path, led to a vague and indistinct desire to escape from school and traditional bourgeois life, without, however, producing anything truly beneficial.

A more noteworthy experiment in Germany was that of Georg Kerschensteiner and his work-oriented school, in which children were to develop a sense of initiative and personal experience through labor.

In Kerschensteiner’s school, work was practical; it aimed “to accustom students to work with absolute precision according to models to which the finished product must fully conform. Measuring, weighing, working with care, and objectively controlling the product of labor according to the concept of activity directed toward a well-defined end—that is, toward a production of intrinsic value” (*G. Gaspari, Educazione e lavoro in Kerschensteiner*, Florence 1940). This value is moral, in the sense that not every kind of work is educational, but only that which cultivates skills and qualities serving real values. “Education,” Kerschensteiner wrote in *Il concetto della scuola del lavoro* (Italian trans., Florence 1935, pp. 46 ff.), “must never forget that wherever it demands work, such demand cannot overlook the possibility of achieving a complete capacity for producing objective value.” In other words, work without the aim of moral formation is not truly work, but merely technical skill that remains outside the personality and thus devoid of objective—that is, moral—value.

V. THE MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Dewey notes, first of all, how the school, by separating 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 grasp and make it his own. A particular and essential task of the school is that it educates pupils to think, and for them to 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 knowledge in which they do not participate because it is presented as a problem of others rather than their own, and because there is no continuity between school and life—beyond the interest that must attract the children, it is necessary that there be an incentive to think and that the children feel responsible for the regular development of the solutions suggested, and that they may test through application, so as to clearly discern their meaning and discover their validity for themselves. Children must be educated for sociality. Play, work, gardening exercises, and various other kinds of work are useful, but they are not educational if they are carried out as mere repetition of acts. In this case, they are mechanical reproductions and therefore do not educate. If the school is to form the whole personality of the child, every form of mechanicity, of play and of combined work must be banished from it; interest, and therefore education, arises from the process that the material offers from the raw state to that of perfection. Gardening, for example, is not interesting insofar as it instructs in the technique of sowing and harvesting certain products, but insofar as it serves to attain a higher order of intellectual knowledge. Indeed, the sciences developed gradually from the useful occupations of men, and the school is truly active when it ensures that its subjects are connected in such a way that the mind feels them as its own achievement, that is, as an act of its formation. The humanism envisaged by Dewey is not that which arises from letters, or at least not only that, but that which arises in any case from the interest that, through doing, the mind applies to free the intelligence and enrich the spirit with further achievements. In Dewey’s conception, there is no division between liberal studies and utilitarian studies. The former must meet the latter in the sense that just as an education would be liberal that did not arise from an inner need and participation of the spirit in culture, so too would a knowledge of practical notions remain mere notions if they did not merge and find unity in the fundamental spiritual life in which alone they can live. The subjects of instruction are studied as they are offered by the situations of life. And in order that the situations be real and interest the child, Dewey utilized the child’s natural tendency, namely play, which must become the center of his entire life. The kind of play Dewey advocates might be called social, in the sense that the children are called to a play that engages them socially, together. Play as a social activity of children is at the basis of the kindergarten as well as of other levels of schooling. Thus, if in the kindergarten the object of play may be, for example, a doll, in the elementary school it may be history, geography, or the sciences, which, when felt and studied in close connection with real situations, offer great possibilities for interests and educational stimuli. The new pedagogical movement promoted by Dewey found in America an interpreter in William Heard Kilpatrick (b. 1871).

Other advocates of the active school in America include Angelo Patri, of Italian origin (b. in Piaggine [Salerno] in 1876), who advocates the need for the child to think and work with joy. Patri aims at the concrete formation of the child’s personality not through the rote learning of facts, but through the child’s participation in life and the reality of nature. Among Patri’s writings are to be noted *Un maestro di scuola di una grande città* (1917), *Scuola e casa* (1925), and *Problemi dell'infanzia* (1926).

The active school has found another fervent supporter in America in Carleton Wolsey Washburne, born in Chicago in 1889. His work includes the renewed schools of Winnetka, a suburb of Chicago. Washburne is the author of various pedagogical and didactic works. A synthesis of his thought is found in his *Filosofia vivente dell'educazione* (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 progress freely in his school curriculum. The schools of Winnetka must strive, as Washburne himself says, “to be centers in which the children live happily, where 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.” For this reason, the program is divided into two well-distinguished parts. One comprises the knowledge and techniques by means of which we seek to attain a common level in all pupils; the other consists of stimuli and opportunities provided with a view to creative work that interests the community. The school seeks to achieve a goal that is common to all, but since the children are differently endowed with intelligence, a method has been devised that makes it possible for each intelligence to reach that result according to its own capacity. This result comprises three levels. Once the objectives to be achieved are precisely established, these can be reached by every normal child. For children below normal there is a modified program; for all others, it is required that they reach all the set objectives. The material in these schools has been designed to be self-consultative. The child proceeds by himself at every level of study. Having completed one level, he moves on to the next. He corrects his own daily work and his readiness tests, which are exercises by means of which the existence or absence of certain aptitudes can be verified. The control tests made available to the child are designed in such a way as to refer the child back to the corrective exercises necessary to remedy the deficiencies revealed by these tests. The pupil who fails a test performs the practical work indicated, then submits to the same test, presented in a different form. This work of acquiring knowledge and technique occupies half of the pupil’s morning and half of his afternoon, and is individual work. The remaining 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 adapted to the age of the children with

which can be better grouped together. This creative activity includes critical listening to music, critical study of art and literature, life on the playing field, and the drafting and illustration of the pupils’ newspaper. The purpose of this collective activity is not to acquire knowledge but to foster in children a social conscience; hence the attempt to present human labor within a social framework. The Winnetka school organization comprises two bodies: the research section and the advisory section for education. The former addresses general school problems, while the latter is a laboratory for child orientation, where the physician, psychiatrist, and teacher each, based on their investigations, indicate which methods and procedures can be adopted for each child.

Another American initiative, still within the broader framework of the active school, is the Dalton Laboratory Plan (piano-laboratorio di Dalton), devised by the American educator Helen Parkhurst (b. 1889), who in 1914 attended Maria Montessori’s courses and was influenced by her method. From 1911 to 1913 in Dalton, an American town, Parkhurst experimented with transforming the school to adapt it to the individual work of each pupil. She continued this experiment later in New York.

Parkhurst’s method applies to children aged ten and above and is based on the premise that children should live freely at school as they do at home. It is not the teachers who impart knowledge and information; rather, pupils initiate their own research, and teachers assist them by offering suggestions and advice, directing them to appropriate readings selected from the classroom library. In the Dalton Plan, pupils are not bound to their class either in terms of curriculum or time. When a pupil has completed the curriculum for a given class at any point during the year, they move on to the next class. Consequently, classrooms are not organized by class but by subject (laboratories). Pupils are assigned a monthly task (twenty days) divided into subject-based work units. Students are free to organize their work. Teachers are tasked with advising and overseeing their progress. The school day is divided into various periods: the work period (laboratory period), the time reserved for guiding pupils (organization period), and the time reserved for instruction (conference period). In the Dalton Plan, individual and group work are combined, as the nature of the tasks allows pupils to work either alone or in groups. Individual and group work should be understood in the sense that each pupil’s activity is partly one and partly the other, and while one works independently, their work is integrated and becomes part of the work of others. Uniformity of work is not the goal; rather, differentiation of work is pursued in view of a common objective. Parkhurst outlined her method in the work *Education on the Dalton Plan* (London, 1922).

VI. THE ACTIVE SCHOOL IN ITALY

In her view, the child encounters countless obstacles in development; these must be removed, and the child must be helped to live. The adult must change their approach toward the child. The child must be left free to express and develop themselves. However, “the environment” in which the child lives is disproportionate to their strength and small hands; thus, the environment becomes an impediment to the child’s ability to express and develop their activity. To this end, an environment proportionate to the nature and stage of the children must be created—one that will allow

to enable the child to “carry out an orderly activity aimed at achieving reasonable ends” (M. Montessori, Manuale di pedagogia scientifica, Naples 1935, pp. 5–6). The environment in which the child lives must not interpose itself as an obstacle between the child and the environment itself, for 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 rather one 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 for exercising; the teacher’s function consists in giving the child the capacity for choice, by organizing work suited to the society in which the child lives.

“The most important objects in 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 child’s entire psychic and moral personality; and that gradually lead the child, with exuberant and powerful energy, to conquer the most arduous fundamental learnings of culture: such as reading, writing, and singing.” The “materials, fixed in the Montessori schools, taken as a whole, constitute a systematic instrument of psychology that can be compared to a gymnasium for the spirit, where the child, by exercising spontaneously, progresses in its development and thus also in the acquisition of culture” (Montessori, op. cit., p. 65). The materials, carefully prepared and systematically arranged by the teacher and always within the children’s reach, are freely chosen by them according to their needs. The teacher intervenes only when she sees the child in need of advice. She must also establish the appropriate correspondence between individual objects and the child’s age. On this fact rests the practical ability to recognize, from the children’s reactions, useful or productive acts from those that instead dissipate energy, “so as to be able to direct and assist with certainty the wonderful group of little workers, concentrated in their task.” Older children can take on other tasks such as gardening, fieldwork, etc.

The “Children’s Houses” arose in Rome around 1906, when the Istituto dei beni stabiliti decided to select, in a hall under the guidance of a teacher, the children aged three to seven of the tenants of the large tenement buildings. The “Children’s Houses” spread widely, both in Rome and elsewhere throughout the world. Montessori’s method certainly had more success outside than within the peninsula. Italy, a country of ancient civilization and tested culture, perhaps perceived in the Montessori method the limitation that, despite the undeniable fervor that pervades it, prevents it from rising to a higher pedagogy. In Montessori’s method, the environment and the materials end up drawing all attention to themselves, thereby causing the living element, the real person—that is, the child—to slip away. The education of the senses, certainly good in itself, remains insufficient if it does not translate into an inner knowledge, valid not for the purposes of feeling and seeing, but of understanding and judging. The entire pedagogical act cannot be exhausted in the education of the senses; this can only be a means to that higher education which is moral and intellectual.

The vaunted freedom on which the “Children’s House” is founded is compromised when one considers—as some have—that the purely mechanical conception of development, as a gymnastics of the organs performed with the aid of specially chosen apparatus, bears within itself the imprint of passivity, so much at odds with Montessori’s affirmation (cf. S. Hessen, Fondamenti della pedagogia come filosofia applicata, Palermo 1937, pp. 126–127). Not to mention that the environment of the “House,” which claims to proclaim the children’s freedom, ends up circumscribing and limiting it, inasmuch as it confines the entire action of the child within the limits that the environment itself imposes.

Despite this inability of the Montessori method to transcend the particularism and mechanism inherent in it, and to elevate the school toward an ideal unity of human formation, the programs for elementary schools of 1923 and those for method schools for maternal education do not fail to incorporate elements of Montessori pedagogy.

Among the attempts at active schools in Italy, mention must also be made of the rural schools of La Montesca and Rovigliano by L. and A. Franchetti, who opened the first Montessori kindergarten at La Montesca, and of Giuseppina Pizzigoni’s “Scuola rinnovata” (Renewed School) in the Ghisolfa, a working-class district of Milan. Pizzigoni’s school, established as a legal entity in 1927, consists of an eight-year elementary course; it follows the official program of elementary schools, but respects the freedom and activity of the pupils, in the sense that the teacher’s lesson does not exhaust the entire school, for the pupils’ activity precedes the teacher’s lesson. Gardening, play, outdoor life, workshop work, and excursions are of paramount importance in this school. Pizzigoni illustrated her method in several writings, including: 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, though with limited influence, have not been lacking; mention should be Cena (v.) in the Agro Romano, by Alessandro Marcucci and others in the schools of the Associazione per gli interessi del mezzogiorno and the Ente nazionale di cultura in Florence. Within the framework of the active school must also be considered the kindergarten of Mompiano run by the Agazzi sisters. Perhaps more than Montessori’s, the Agazzi kindergarten corresponds to the needs of the Italian conscience. The Agazzi kindergarten bases the children’s education on spontaneity and doing. The children find in the kindergarten an environment suited to their conditions; they directly attend to all the needs of common life—cleanliness, order of the environment, garden, gardening, bathing; the older ones help the younger ones in their needs; singing, music, and spontaneous drawing all contribute to making the child’s life joyful, free from any artifice, and to promoting their physical, intellectual, and moral development. In the Agazzi kindergarten, the materials, so carefully chosen and based on scientific criteria in the Montessori school, have nothing special or recherché about them; they are prepared by the teacher and the pupils; everything can serve to enrich the school museum: a print, a plant, a fossil, a work of art, etc.

Another experiment worth recalling is the “Scuola-città Pestalozzi,” promoted by Ernesto Codignola and opened in Florence in 1945 in the premises of a municipal school. “It is rooted,” writes Codignola himself in one of his publications from which much of the information here has been drawn (Le scuole nuove e i loro problemi, Florence, n.d.), “in the concept that it must be the organization of collective life in all its manifold aspects that spontaneously educates toward social and moral discipline and toward knowledge. It aims to be a community that educates itself to self-government by learning the exercise of freedom through spontaneous submission to its own law. More than a school in the traditional sense of the word, it wants to be a community of work in which all, in turn, participate in all aspects of collective life, from the humblest to the most elevated tasks.”

This same principle underlies the so-called "Città" or "Villaggi dei ragazzi" (Cities or Boys' Villages), an example of which was given by Fr. E. J. Flanagan; the most notable is that of S. Marinella, founded and directed by Don Antonio Rivolta. The "Villaggio dei ragazzi" gathers a considerable number (around a hundred) of young boys whom the war had led astray, separating them from family discipline and pushing them to live on the streets with all the moral temptations and dangers that this entailed in the large cities immediately after the war. The boys, generally between the ages of 12 and 18, live freely in the village. Their education must not arise from precepts but from the very organization of communal life. The village is a true community: justice, the bank, cleaning, policing, and various trades are all carried out by the boys themselves. The administration of the village or the exercise of justice is achieved through regular elections. Every day, in the assembly that brings together all the citizens, the problems affecting the community are discussed. The boys live in the village on the fruit of their own labor. Whatever the work may be, it is remunerated with a currency that circulates within the village. With the proceeds of their labor (the currency is called "meriti"), the boys meet all their needs: food, lodging, etc. Whenever the boys wish to leave the village, they can go to the exchange office of the local bank to exchange their meriti for lire according to the day's rate. There is no doubt about the educational value of this system when one considers that it aims to educate to self-government children who were previously led astray and given over to vice. The organization found ready imitation elsewhere.

VI. To complete this picture of the active school, two names must still be mentioned: that of Decroly and that of Ferrière.

Dr. Ovide Decroly (1871–1932) was led—as was Montessori—to the study of pedagogical problems by his contact, in the Brussels polyclinic, with handicapped children. Decroly wished to apply to normal children the same methods used for abnormal ones. In 1907, he opened in Brussels the École de l'Enfance, so named from the street in which it was located. Decroly's principle is that for a child to learn, an interest must first arise within him. Children generally have the same interests as the first men: to nourish themselves, to defend themselves, to struggle against obstacles and enemies, to work. These are the common centers of interest for boys. Therefore, in the first four grades of Decroly's school, these criteria are established as central and fundamental movements, as trunks from which a whole series of knowledge and notions can branch out. Around these centers of interest, the child's activity is engaged, driven by the interest that arises from that central theme. Decroly aimed to develop in children the spirit of observation, which, combined with the need to collect, enabled the children themselves to contribute to enriching the teaching material. Through small trips and through the interest that children develop in current events—thus drawing their attention to facts that would otherwise remain outside their experience—a school is created whose fundamental purpose is interest. In addition to the centers of interest, Decroly affirmed, for the purpose of learning to read, the global method, which, moreover, had been discussed in the 19th century by our Lambruschini, who started from the elementary principle that the child learns to read as he learned to speak, that is, by receiving the word as a unit and not in its syllabic composition. Decroly, who in 1914 was a professor of pedagogy at the Institut supérieur de Buls Temps in Brussels, is the author of various pedagogical works, among which are to be noted *Vers l'école renouée* (in collaboration with Gérard Boon, Paris-Brussels 1921); *La fonction de globalisation et l'enseignement* (ibid. 1929); *Études de psychologie* (ibid. 1932); *Comment l'enfant arrive à parler* (ibid. 1934).

Adolfo Ferrière, to whom reference has been made above, is the other educator who became a champion of the active school in Europe. Ferrière was born in Geneva in 1879. His work is linked to that of other Swiss educators such as Bovet, Claparède, and Piaget. Ferrière perceived the spiritual richness within the child and advocated a school in which the child is placed in a position to assert himself as spontaneity and freedom. In 1899, Ferrière founded the Bureau international des écoles nouvelles, which lasted until 1925, and in 1926 the Bureau international de l'éducation. In 1921, the Ligue internationale pour l'éducation nouvelle was founded in Calais.