“Educational Italianness”. National Stereotypes and Pedagogical Localism in the Centenary Celebrations of Italian and Foreign Educationalists between the 19th and 20th Centuries

The centenaries of the birth and death of some of the greatest Italian and foreign educators between the end of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s offer the opportunity to affirm the concept of “educational italianness”. Our young nation – in search of illustrious antecedents and its own cultural traditions – is committed to defining the uncertain boundaries of its national identity also in the pedagogical field. But what are the characteristics of this “educational italianness”? Using the speeches written for official celebrations, the contents of celebratory epigraphs, occasional flyers and other unpublished sources, this work will attempt to analyse this concept, highlighting how it is not substantiated by scientific evidence but rather by nationalistic stereotypes, which, however, had an easy grip on public opinion and quickly become part of the common sense. The official celebrations of Italian Aporti and Thuringian Fröbel, in addition to highlighting the differences between the pedagogical methods of these two bearers of kindergartens, for example, pointed out that the former was a Catholic and the latter a Protestant. There were several attempts to reconstruct the ancient Italian origins of the Pestalozzi family, almost as if the pedagogical greatness of the Swiss educator – who was one of the first to establish the concept of the “modern school” – could be based on a genealogical and hereditary basis. Even humanist Vittorino da Feltre was used as reference to make him the illustrious patriarch of entire generations of teachers to whom the task of “making Italians” was entrusted and continued to be entrusted. Therefore, it turns out that the “educational italianness” is not based on specific pedagogical characteristics, but on a cultural archetype that is functional to re-signifying the past and creating a solid cultural tradition to limit the dependence of our educators and teachers from foreign pedagogical thought and especially from the German one, which had always exerted a strong influence. In this context, it is also possible to identify another concept: that of the “small pedagogical homelands” that competed – according to the best localist tradition – on the topic of the origins of some illustrious thinkers and pedagogues, as if it were impossible to disregard the environmental data and the geographical context to explain their greatness. The historical dispute between Aporti’s birthplace (San Martino dell’Argine) and the city where he built his first kindergartens (Cremona), for example, was triggered by the centenaries of his birth and death. Xenomania and xenophobia thus alternate fiercely in these celebrations, which reveal their dependence on the collective imaginary, which grew over time within a given community rather than on actual historical reality.