Barbiana in my personal life and in the life of the Italian school

Abstract

The reading of Letter to a Teacher and Barbiana's radical proposal
changed the professional life of the author, who took them as a fundamental reference
to this day. But Barbiana's proposal is difficult to translate into the national daily
school reality; and the author found an answer to this need in Mario Lodi, who shares
Barbiana's fundamental principles and translates them into a methodology applied to
a 4-hour-a-day public elementary school. These two experiences, which then seemed

extraordinary and difficult to apply, today correspond exactly to the indications con-
tained in the Convention on the Rights of the Child and are, therefore, the only ones

legally applicable and, consequently, obligatory.