Superare il sottosviluppo con l’istruzione: analisi della ricezione e applicazione delle riforme scolastiche in Sardegna (1860-1921)

In the first Italian census (1861) the region with the higher percentage of illiterate citizens was Sardinia with a rate of 91,17%. In 1921, one year before Mussolini’s dictatorship, which will mark a chronological break for this paper, it stood at 49%. This was the result of a slow-starting mass education process and of the pragmatic adaptation and reformation of a State school that was born in and for a very different social context, and that was blind to the needs of the underdeveloped areas of the Country. Despite its belonging to the Savoia Kingdom before it became the Italian Kingdom in 1861, Sardinia was one of the most underdeveloped regions of the newborn nation-state. Therefore, also the Casati Law of 1859, which define the structure and organization of the kingdom’s school system, was not easy to apply. The lack of preexisting civil as well as scholastic infrastructures, the opposition of fringes of the population, and, sometimes, of the same institutions that were supposed to apply it, affected the effectiveness of this constitutive law that was perceived as a reform of consolidated (but weak) schooling costumes. The first 60 years of Italian school’s history changed and shaped the school both as a concrete place where lessons take place and as a community of teachers and learners. The Municipalities of Sardinia slowly developed a new urban layout with school buildings that became central in the towns’ and cities’ life. This happened also thanks to some important dedicated measures taken by the Italian government for the most underdeveloped Regions of Southern and Insular Italy. These reforms also changed the professional figure of the teacher and, with it, the teaching practices. The sources used to collect the data for this paper are both first and second hand, from local and State Archives. Most of them were collected in the wider frame of the PRIN project Literacy and Development in Southern Italy from Italian Unification to the Giolittian Era (1861-1914) and of the S.I.ST.eM. project (Sardegna: Istruzione, Storia e Memoria; Sardinia: Instruction, History and Memory). The paper aims to analyze the tangible effects of these school reforms and the legislation against underdevelopment especially when it involved schooling as a way to overtake it. The paper will highlight, with a large sort of examples how the rise of education, in particular primary education, influenced and, at the same time, was influenced by the social needs during this chronological range and in a diversified region suchas Sardinia. It will show how the dialogue between the center and periphery has changed during those decades and how school reforms and legislation shaped the life and the urban outline of cities, towns, and villages of the Island.