Lorenzo Milani, The School of Barbiana and the Struggle for Social Justice

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Preface

Several years ago, in the middle of a typically stimulating conversation with my good friend, Peter Mayo, he referred to the Letter to a Teacher (Lettera a una Professoressa, henceforth the Lettera), and asked me if I was aware of it. I think he was possibly rather surprised when I told him that not only was I aware of the book, but that, at the beginning of the1970s, I had been part of a UK Open University sociology of education course team that had made it a set text for students. We were both as delighted as we were surprised, and an invitation to write the Preface for this most interesting volume is the latest outcome of that original conversation.

These origins mean that this piece will necessarily reflect that rather partial understanding of many of the themes covered in the volume. However, the richness and significance of the Lettera continue to shine, assisted by the work of the many contributors referred to in the Introduction.

The continuing interest in the Lettera, from a range of points of view, demonstrates that the book has considerable contemporary as well as historical significance. However, I do not mean this in a clichéd, ‘nothing new under the sun’ way. Rather, it is to indicate elements of the importance of the book even when the conditions that had provided such a welcoming context for it on publication have effectively disappeared. Those conditions included vigorous debates around both the nature of education, which in England took the form of ‘progressive education,’ ← vii | viii → and the change from selective towards comprehensive entrance to secondary education, about both of which the Lettera had something original and significant to contribute. More broadly, we were still in the era of the Cold War and of the ideological battles which it spawned, which, as the Lettera showed, took on rather different hues in Italy—and Southern Europe more broadly—particularly through the possibilities of relationships between Catholicism and Socialism.

For me, there are two main aspects of those different contextual conditions where the Lettera remains prominent. On the one hand, the significance of the relationships between the ideas expressed in and through education, and the goals (especially those relating to social justice) remain as crucial as ever. On the other, a central feature of the Lettera is that they are addressed to parents, and here we find almost no parallels between the two epochs.

In terms of the first of these, we find differences in both the central meanings and the nature of social justice, and how it might be attained though education. Despite the differences of interpretation, at the time of the publication of the Lettera, and pervading its text, there was still a sense that a properly oriented and organized state education system was a key means to bringing about significant social change, especially through changes in both the role and the distribution of education. To put it rather too simply, it was assumed that this project would deliver social justice in its wake. And maybe the current emphasis on, and centrality of, social justice in itself is one major reflection of the failure of the social democratic goals and processes of the 1970s. In terms of the substance of social justice, following Nancy Fraser, it is not now possible to ignore the expansion of the aspects of social justice to include recognition and representation as well as the implicit redistribution on which the Lettera rested (where ‘class’ had been the key status, rather than one identity among many). And even these face a challenge from, for instance, Enrique Dussel’s proposed substitution of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, by Liberation, Alterity and Solidarity.

As far as the contribution of schooling to the attainment of social justice goals goes, it is notable that the writers of the Lettera focus strongly on the role of the curriculum (and indeed, this may have been one of the reasons for its adoption for the Open University course, since the main text for the course was M. F. D. Young’s Knowledge and Control, which emphasized the class basis of the selection of school knowledge). Nevertheless, as this volume shows, there was quite sufficient material to make the Lettera an extremely significant resource for the development of a critical pedagogy, which did enable a move beyond the curriculum as the crucial area of educational contestation. ← viii | ix →

However, when we come to consider the changes in the roles of parents since the Lettera was written, we do find rather more severe caesurae. The differences I notice may be at least as cultural/spatial as administrative/organizational. They involve the shifts of parents as a group from the cooperative pursuit of collectively determined and mutually beneficial goals, to making parents into individually mutually competitive drivers of (increasingly more ‘private’ and less ‘public’) systems of selection and stratification of access to the (increasingly narrowly defined) benefits of compulsory education. This may prove one of the most deeply embedded obstacles to the possibility of the emergence of democratic and egalitarian education systems and experiences.

While it is useful to be able to point to the continuing similarities between what is described and critiqued by the schoolchildren of Barbiana and what continue to be the experiences of children in contemporary schools (and the systems within which they are enmeshed), it would also seem entirely appropriate to try to learn from the continuities and discontinuities, both empirical and ideological, that they reveal. Take, for instance, one of the more vivid and often quoted phrases from the Lettera: ‘school is a hospital that tends to the healthy and neglects the sick.’ For while the phrase certainly retains its vividness and impact when taken alone, as it often seems to be, it loses its key nuances and contemporaneity, when it is detached from the argument to which it is a clinching conclusion. That argument suggests that while we are all aware of the problems caused for other learners by ‘trouble makers,’ or ‘slow’ children, for instance, that does not justify disregarding their presence or their particular needs and interests; it is that particular dereliction that would make schools into ‘hospitals that tend for the healthy and neglect the sick.’ And, as in the case of parents, the definitions of ‘healthy and ‘sick’ persist as if unchanged, with no recognition of the changing meanings and connotations attaching to them, especially as these relate to conceptions of democratic and egalitarian partnership.

Finally, what for me the Lettera provides above all, is a resource of hope, against T. S. Eliot’s pessimistic conservative surrender, that there could be no hope, ‘for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.’

Roger Dale
July 2013

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