Il maestro giusto nel “paese sbagliato”. La scuola di Mario Lodi tra educazione democratica e cooperazione educativa (1948-1963)

This contribution – whose title refers to the title of his most famous work, "Il Paese Sbagliato" (The Wrong Country) of 1970 – intends to present the innovative educational experience conducted by Mario Lodi in the Italian school between the end of the Forties and the beginning of the Sixties. Through the use of unpublished sources, housed in several archives, the complex path of professional development of this teacher is reconstructed first in the primary school of San Giovanni in Croce and then in that of Vho di Piadena, where the innovative teaching techniques of Célestin Freinet were applied. The militancy in the Movimento di Cooperazione Educativa, the project to create an experimental Freinetian school in Coldigioco with Giuseppe Tamagnini and Giovanna Legatti, the momentary entry on leave and the transfer to Edizioni Avanti! of Milan to direct the series «Universale Ragazzi», in some way anticipating «Biblioteca di Lavoro», are the subsequent stages of an extraordinary human journey essential to understand the exhausting process of renewal faced by the Italian school in those years.