Don Lorenzo Milani was a bad teacher, we still pay for his damages today in the Italian school. The analysis
Three days ago all of Italy ate the celebration of the centenary of the birth of Don Lorenzo Milani, the Florentine priest alleged educator of pueri in his legendary school of Barbiana. Milani was a 68-year-old ante litteram whose book “Pastoral Experiences” it was first published with the ecclesiastical imprimatur and then revoked by the Holy Office in 1958 and only in 2014 was it given the go-ahead. His came from a wealthy bourgeois family, his mother a Bohemian Jew, confirming the radical-chic ideal type of the left. In fact, one that Elly Schlein likes in agony.
READ ALSO: Mattarella places a cushion of flowers on Don Milani’s tombstone
The boy graduates from Berchet high school in Milan but he is a donkey and has little profit. The boy is bizarre and after school he wants to be a painter and in 1941 he also begins to attend the studio of a German artist during the war. It is the desperation of his family. When he was a painter Milani falls in love with a beautiful red-haired girl, Tiziana Fantini, who was already romantically engaged but this did not prevent the two from dating, on the contrary. Subsequently, however, she feels the call of faith and distances herself from Tiziana who will instead become a painter.
READ ALSO: Knowledge is power, 100 years since the birth of don Milani
Meanwhile, in addition to the call of the spirit, the future priest also feels the bites of the flesh and “almost gets engaged” with Carla Sborgi. Milani in 1943 also leaves Carla who will be left very badly, he converts and enters the seminary where there is so much latinorum and related carnal consequences and in 1947 he is ordained a priest.
But it is a “mad priest” who immediately begins to quarrel furiously with the Curia who hunts him. Then he goes grumpy to the Mugello village of Barbiana where he founds the famous school. His school had to be “democratic” and that is hostile to the “children of the rich”, which for him meant all normal people. A hail of righteous criticism comes upon him.
To answer them he wrote a pamphlet with an erotic title, “Letter to a teacher”, which has become a cult for all the radical-chic leftists. His pedagogy was that of a “professor friend” who caused irreparable damage to the Italian school and we are still fighting against it. For him, school shouldn’t be competitive, merit shouldn’t prevail but only help to poor students. So the notions had to be simplified, with the master preparing the cultural porridge by chewing it first and then regurgitating it.
From here the mass production of donkeys that churned out the Italian school in subsequent years. The current Italian scholastic degradation is in fact the poisoned fruit of the vision of Don Milani who did not want grammar to be taught, the classics such as the Iliad translated by Monti or Foscolo because the difficulty of these texts would have “humiliated” the poor boy.
Subscribe to the newsletter