CARLI, GIAN RINALDO. - Born at Capodistria on 11 April 1720, died at Milan on 22 February 1795, he is one of the most distinctive personalities of the Milanese cultural milieu that flourished around Verri, Beccaria and Parini. A professor of astronomy and navigation at the University of Padua at the age of 24 (1744-49), he displayed the fruit of his scientific studies in the work Sulla declinazione dell'ago magnetico (1747). After a vain attempt to found an industry, he went to Milan (1764), where he became a member of that cultivated society which gathered around the Caffè.
He published in 1765 the Discorso della Patria agli italiani; and in economic science he displayed his competence with a work Delle monete e dell'istituzione delle zecche in Italia, still appreciated today by economists.
He turned particular attention to educational problems, as to those which could contribute to improving society both in relation to morals and to the knowledge of the mind. To this end he wrote the Nuovo metodo per le scuole pubbliche d'Italia (Opere, XVIII, Milan 1787).
C., noting the defect of the schools of his time, in which pedantic teachers exercised the memory rather than formed the mind, traces a plan of scholastic reform, affirming first of all that education belongs to the State, which must provide common education schools for children from 4 to 9-10 years of age, who will learn there to read, to write and to do arithmetic. These schools are followed by those which he calls elementary, but which in reality correspond to the present ginnasio-liceo: their purpose is to give an intellectual culture, first activating the memory (with the study of languages, of moral maxims, of geography, which must start from the topography of one's own country, and of history), then reflection (geometry, logic); finally the young will study Italian poetry, Latin poetry and eloquence. Linking himself to certain principles of the humanistic school, C. wanted glory and honour to be placed in the education of the young as the stimuli most suited to making them acquire « vigour and energy for great things and for useful actions and enterprises ». To complete their studies there followed on the one hand the Academy of sciences and arts, with frankly scientific aims, and on the other the university with wholly professional aims.
Though not exempt from the influence of Rousseau, C. with his work L'uomo libero confutes the Contrat social of the Genevan, while with the Ragionamento sulla ineguaglianza fisica, morale e civile tra gli uomini (1792), he criticizes the Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes of the same Rousseau. In the first essay he aims to arouse « subordination and respect toward the laws ».
In the other essay he affirms against Rousseau the spiritual and ethical inequality of Christianity, in whose conception physical, moral and civil inequalities constitute a law of harmony necessary for the ends of the conservation and progress of society, which is « a mountain composed of strata of diverse nature, one superimposed upon the other, in such a way that they mutually support one another », « by contrast a mountain all composed of uniform sand, against no vicissitude of rain, wind or air can it resist ».
Bibliography9 works
Nino Sammartano