Why do I think that Milani is the great Pedagogue of the 20th century?

Abstract

“Goodness is noiseless”. “Truth never shows up fancily dressed”. So happens with Barbiana and Lorenzo Milani; a rural school hidden in a forsaken hamlet– even more adequate metaphor would be: a lonely ant in the middle of the Sahara desert– plus a “priore” well wound up and brewed by his brothers in the priesthood and by the catholic hierarchy. A freshman in the role of maestro without having experienced a previous training (a sort of tightrope walker without a security net). One and the other, school and master, despite forsaken in the crude and adverse nothingness and thus condemned to everybody else’s oblivion, have become in a peerless model of the twentieth century’s education. These are the reasons I sustain to this assertion: a theory saved by its simplicity; the argument questioned about the mysterious ethos at the core of education; an example of the antidote against the toxic utopia; and for the powerful potential of exemplarity which it contains.