Tre "Maestri". Alberto Manzi

First of a series of three essays dedicated to three italian teachers who grew up in the framework of fascist Italy and entered their mature life after World War II, this one is dedicated to Alberto Manzi and reveals a little-known figure outside the stereotype of the television broadcast " Non è mai troppo tardi". Alberto Manzi introduces us to the complex ideological situation in which the post-fascist Italy knows the development of a new pedagogy for the democratic society. In the aftermath of the war, an enormous amount of political and intellectual resources are mobilized around the problem of education. New questions are associated to old problems. The never definitively resolved popular illiteracy together with the extension of compulsory schooling, the issue of “scuola media unica”, are now flanked by a new general question: the birth of democracy, in the absence of significant democratic experiences of italian people, stimulates intense pedagogical research. While politics is committed to the “scuola popolare” and the reform of the Italian education system, associations and initiatives for the promotion of a new educational culture are multiplying. Manzi participates in this movement as a young teacher, revealing from the beginning his dual vocation as a teacher and writer for children. Assistant of Luigi Volpicelli at the University of Rome, the issue of a new school for a mass society, which had been the great theme of the Thirties and of the groups of Intellectuals around Giuseppe Bottai and his publishing initiatives, finds in Alberto Manzi an unexpected version. Thanks to a scholarship that took him to Latin America in the early 1950s, Manzi discovered the great peasant question of the sub-American continent in years of great ideological and political ferment. He will remain tied to Spanish America for a significant part of his life, returning systematically to the vast continent for more than twenty years, exposing himself to all the risks involved. The link that he establishes with the Hispano-American world will find significant recognition in the late 1980s by the government of Argentina who will want to recognize the merits achieved by the italian teacher in the field of popular literacy.