PARATO, GIOVANNI AND ANTONINO. - GIOVANNI, teacher and educationist, b. at Sommariva Bosco (Cuneo) in 1816, d. at Turin in 1874. Ordained priest in Rome, he was professor of rhetoric in Latium; in 1848 he moved to Turin, where discussions on the organization of elementary schools were then at their height.
Appointed a teacher, he devoted himself to drafting various texts for pupils of the different classes following the progressive method: Esercizi graduati; Composizioni italiane; Grammatica italiana per le elementari superiori, Compendio per le inferiori; Grammatica normale teorica e applicata, for teacher-training, grammar and technical schools, with the collaboration of C. Mottura; Manuale per il maestro; Storia romana; Storia sacra; books that display the author's pedagogical and didactic art and that held first place in the schools for a quarter of a century; above all the Storia sacra became one of the most popular texts. For teachers he founded in 1864 the journal: Guida del maestro elementare italiano, at first to make it easier for the teacher to apply in practice the university teaching of Turin; then adding a bibliographical review and the discussion of the laws and school questions of the day. This was one of the first attempts in Italy at a periodical press to guide teachers in the discharge of their task. He did not forget rural teachers, for whom he established prizes and welfare provisions; and at his death his estate benefited the nursery school of Carmagnola, the Artigianelli of Turin and the College of Assisi for the orphans of teachers.
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ANTONINO, a capable coadjutor of his brother Giovanni, b. at Cuneo in Aug. 1823, d. at Turin in 1908. After teaching rhetoric in various institutions, he was called to Turin in 1854 as a professor attached to the University and in 1861 sent by the minister De
Sanctis to Campania as inspector and organizer of elementary and secondary schools.
Returning to Turin, he collaborated with his brother on the Guida del maestro italiano and after his brother's death took over its direction until 1897. To him elementary and secondary schooling owes a fine series of useful and educational school books (Libro di lettura; Storia d'Italia; L'Uomo, etc.) and pedagogy the precious volume: La scuola pedagogica nazionale, Studi educativi, teorici e pratici (Turin 1885), in which he exalts the need to follow the Italian pedagogical tradition, of religious instruction, of the national idea, of the care of the family, the first school and the first society to which the duty of educating belongs; he then refutes the self-styled scientific positivist psychology, then triumphant, in favor of traditional Italian spiritualism. In Gli asili d'infanzia di Torino in 60 anni di vita he gives information of great value for the history of education in the second half of the past century.
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Celestino Testore