Dewey in Postwar-Italy: The Case of Re-Education

Abstract

After the end of the Second World War, Italy was the first Axis country (followed by Germany and Japan), to undergo a process of “reeducation” by the allied troops, focusing initially on the education system. Under the direction of American scholars and school innovators, school syllabi and textbooks were rewritten in order to replace the ideological indoctrination exerted by the Fascist regime from 1923 to 1943 with democratic ideas. This article reconstructs different phases of the influence of John Dewey’s progressive education in Italy. This influence was predominant in policy and experimental schools, as well as in educational theory in the period immediately following the War, but it was almost eliminated from policy documents in a restorative backlash of the Cold War. From the sixties on however, Dewey’s pedagogical thinking, which never lost ground within the liberal, laicist and Marxist circles, gradually and selectively regained influence in policies and reforms.