UNIVERSITY OF CASTILLA-LA MANCHA

Albacete’s Faculty of Education

Subject: Contemporary trends in education
Teacher: Antonio Cebrián Martínez
Academic year: 2017-2018

Critical Pedagogy and Citizenship:

“Lorenzo Milani and the school of Barbiana”

Students:
Eva Álvarez Lorente
José Francisco Campos Martínez
Antonio Morcillo Martínez
Javier Ruiz Izquierdo
Master degree in Primary Education
2nd course group B
Date of submission: 09/03/2018
 CONTENTS

1. Critical Pedagogy and Citizenship: “Lorenzo Milani and the school

of Barbiana”
1.1 Introduction.
1.2 Social Justice, Leadership and Citizenship.
1.3 Lorenzo Milani.
1.4 Adult and youth Education in San Donato di Calenzano.
1.5 The School of Barbiana and an education for critical citizenship.
1.6 Austerity and pedagogy of compassion.
2. Questions

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1. Critical Pedagogy and Citizenship: “Lorenzo Milani and the school
of Barbiana”
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Critical pedagogy is an area of critical thinking and action. Southern Europe, especially
the area of Southern Italy and the island of Sardinia, is the region that has produced one
of the most important thinkers and activists in the field of education whose work and
ideas were associated to critical pedagogy. Therefore, some key figures of intellectual
influence that contributed to the development of a critical pedagogical approach are:
Antonio Gramsci, Danilo Dolci, Aldo Capitini and Ettore Gelpi.

1.2 SOCIAL JUSTICE, LEADERSHIP AND CITIZENSHIP

The critical pedagogy approach is here based on a struggle for social justice. The concern
is with equipping subaltern groups with the means to exercise social leadership and
develop a notion of citizenship that is not restricted to citizens (being producers and
consumers) but expansive. In this notion of citizenship, people are conceived as critically
conscious and socially involved actors, which look for opening greater democratic
spaces and dismantling oppressive structures.
The pedagogical challenge is providing an education that emphasises the connection
between learning and the potential of a collective approach, to a learning based on a
process of critical pedagogues called “critical literacy”.
The stimulus for such pedagogical approach towards the development of a critical
citizenship derives from the legacy of Lorenzo Milani and the text “Lettera a Una
Professoressa” that emerged from his school of Barbiana. The text is a radical critique
of traditional schooling and the greatest written legacy of the educational and political
work of the school of Barbiana.

1.3 LORENZO MILANI

He was born in one of the most prestigious families in Florence (the Comparetti). His
immersion in such strong bourgeois cultural capital must have had a telling effect on his
views concerning education and social class privilege later on in his life.
The parents were agnostic (if not atheist) and held liberal views. Owing to the rise of
fascism and the anti-Semitic sentiments associated with this movement, they had to
remarrying within the Catholic Church and baptising their children to avoid persecution
and possible extermination.
The economic depression that marked the 1920s forced Milani’s family to break with the
tradition of the rentier classes. There, Lorenzo attended a school system that could never
match his cultural capital, with a large irrelevant curriculum that was often peppered with
fascist propaganda in favour of Mussolini’s fascist regime.
Lorenzo Milani developed the reputation of having an independent mind, ready to break
with tradition and rebel against constituted authority. Since childhood, when he was at
school he began to develop the first signs of the social injustice that characterized the
society in which he lived.

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Milani broke with the family tradition in many ways. Firstly, he asked for and received
the first Holy Communion instead of going to University, and decided to take up art,
developing a profound interest in religious art.
Lorenzo took another important step in his conversion to Catholicism when he received
confirmation. The agnostic mother’s disappointment would continue to be expressed even
after Lorenzo was ordained priest. Lorenzo immersed himself from the beginning in a
very rigorous study of the Bible and engaged in a radical interpretation of its contents.

1.4 ADULT AND YOUTH EDUCATION IN SAN DONATO DI CALENZANO

After a short period of time in Montespertoli, Don Milano moved the parish of San
Donato di Calenzano. One of the main problems presented were the analysis, the low
capacity of ideas, poor communication skills and the tactics of the existing population.
They were mainly farmers and textile workers populated San Donato.
Milano considered leisure activities as distractions from the urgent need to acquire the
skills to exercise his "right to govern" instead of simply "being governed" in the scuola
serale (night school) or "scuola popolare" (popular school) Through the mastery of the
language, the ability to engage in dialogue with the word and articulate their own ideas
and concept of the world.
At this time, religion in education was fundamental since the good citizen had to be a
good Catholic well versed in religious doctrine and other matters that would strengthen
the faith. But in this case Don Milano was totally against him, he defended the Education
- Church division. He looked for open, sincere and free education in every way.
The educational process was complemented with “The conferenza del Venerdi” (Friday
conference), which was a talk made by a visitor or by Don Milano himself, where the
students (knowing the subject above) could participate and put into practice what they
had learned. The topics were varied and there were constant disagreements, so the debates
and language clashes were constant. Drama sessions were also organized to combat
shyness. Women could not participate in any case in San Donato, but exceptionally they
could do so in these performances.
Don Milano constituted in that parish a selfless and efficient school that could not be
transplanted to another place. That place was only going to be known to carry out an
education process for the most disadvantaged people with the aim that these people could
participate actively in society, that they contribute things and that their quality of life
increased.

1.5 THE SCHOOL OF BARBIANA AND AN EDUCATION FOR CRITICAL

CITIZENSHIP
After seven years of his priesthood, on December 6, 1954, Don Milani arrived in his new
parish. Sant "Andrea a Barbiana, a village of about twenty farms in the hills of the
Mugello region, was a lifeless place that lacked most of the basic services. The only road
that leads to Barbiana came to an end. kilometre away from the town. Despite the desert
atmosphere of Barbiana, this particular phase in Milani's life turned out to be the most
radical, public and controversial.

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This school was still concerned with an education for popular participatory democracy
and leadership, but with a sexist education since it was only available to children and
not to girls. These were also scared as we can see in the text:
“None of the girls from town ever came to Barbiana. Perhaps becausethe road was so
dangerous. Perhaps because of their parents‟ mentality. They believed that a woman
can live her life with the brains of a hen (sic.). Males don´t ask a woman to be
intelligent” (p.10)

1.6 AUSTERITY AND PEDAGOGY OF COMPASSION

It is related to gender relations and with other aspects of life in this school. One form of
punishment is corporal in extreme cases, and even one form of punishment will be
forgotten the next day while the other will be felt for an entire year.
In addition, austerity about Milani’s approach is based on the notion that working-class
students need to work hard (‘blood, sweat and tears’), by virtue of daddy’s children.
The assumption here is that even those parties that ostensibly represent the interests of
the working class, the socialist and communist parties, are the preserve of the dominant
classes. Milani had no problems with socialism as an ideology per se.
In fact, he thought that democracy and socialism are “the two noblest political systems
mankind has yet been given” (Milani, 1988a, p.25), and he considered socialism “the
highest attempt of humankind to give, already on this earth, justice and equality to the
poor.” The problem for Milani and the rest of the Barbiana School is that socialism in
parliament is not being espoused by the sons of workers, the ‘meek’ who should ‘inherent
the Earth’.
Milani and the students at Barbiana seem to doubt whether people from wealthy families
can, despite their allegiances and ethical commitment to the subaltern classes, „jump out
of their skin‟ and break away from their ‘habitus’. Would this consideration apply to
Milani himself?
The basic maxim that he carried with him at San Donato and Barbiana would have been
that the subaltern groups must run while others walk. If one is allowed to adopt the famous
phrase concerning Tanzania’s post-independence development goals.
It also explains his emphasis on alternative ways of educating pupils which makes them
experience a sense of ownership of the learning programme and see learning as fun and
as being better than working long hours in the labour-intensive fields.
Milani was to write with regard to the school schedule:
‘City people are bewildered by its schedule: twelve hours a day, 365 days a year. Before
I arrived, the children kept to the same schedule (and a great deal of fatigue besides) to
provide city people with wool and cheese. There was little to be cheerful about.’
With no break, no little space for leisure time. So, Milani approved for skiing and
swimming for their functional element – skiing connected farms to the school and
swimming helped students overcome fear of water.

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This was a school that affirmed the collective dimensions of learning in contrast to the
dominant compulsory school that promoted a notion of citizenship predicated on the
ideology of competitive individualism so endemic to Capitalist social relations.
The austere programme of citizenship preparation was one based on a politics of solidarity
and caring - a politics of compassion, to borrow a term frequently used in critical
pedagogy circles.
Milani himself tutored the first group of students and he adopted peer tutoring as a main
pedagogical tool, in which students of more or less the same age also taught the younger
ones.
Peer tutoring and cooperative learning worked so well at Barbiana that this process
continued while Milani was being treated for his terminal illness in hospital. Here was a
form of Citizenship development based on learning not for one to ‘have’ (possessive
knowledge and individualism) but to ‘be’ and to ‘be’ for others.
Furthermore, it was a school that did not fail students in that everyone was entitled,
according to the Italian Constitution, to several years of education, years that ere not to
be spent repeating the same class over and over again. Repetition and ultimately exclusion
was the case with the compulsory schooling of students from subaltern social strata.
It is written in a tone of anger that results from the recognition of the ‘symbolic violence’
meted out by a public-school system that serves to reproduce class hierarchies. What is
ostensibly a „fair‟ public education system, intended to provide opportunities for all
citizens.
The system is there to safeguard the interests of middle class children, represented by the
figure of Pierino, with great advantages and who has time for leisure activities, as well as
‘time for his puberty crisis, his year of the blues and his years of rebellion’.
The boys justify their claim, with respect to the class of the school, by empirically
studying the professions of the parents of those children in the primary school. The survey
showed that "by failing the mayor of the children, the teachers manage the same time to
beat the poorest." When Gianni arrived he was fourteen years old and still in the first
interim, continuing education became "an absurdity" Bored and "tired of being scolded
for every penny he spends".
Gianni leaves school, an institution he hates, without acquiring literacy. In summary, the
authors compare the public school with a hospital that treats the healthy and the illness to
the sick. This leads them to participate in a scathing attack on the working conditions of
teachers. The authors argue that teachers work fewer hours than they should, that they do
not have, as a result, they have the right to strike, although they can do other forms of
resistance and actions, to support the teachers' claims, that they do not hurt the children.
The authors argue that teachers spend the extra hours they can devote to a doposcopy
(after-school program) that gives tutorial classes to Pierinos that could allow such
luxurious treatment.
Therefore, they deny the Yannis the opportunity to repair the imbalance caused by the
lack of pleasant cultural capital in the home and the middle environment.

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Following Milani, the boys advocated the establishment, throughout Italy, of the
"doposcuola"
The doposcuola is a much better solution. A child will repeat the work in the afternoon,
but will not lose the year, will not spend money, and will have it with him in both guilt
and struggle.
. It is for this reason that the School of Barbiana involved long hours of study throughout
the week, including weekends the concern for bridging the "cultural capital" divide invites
parallels with Gramsci's defense of a Unitarian boarding school in which seniors are also
encouraged to teach the youngest.
The Lettera offers alternatives based on the Barbiana experience. According to the "I
Care", or more appropriately "We Care" slogan in the Barbiana School, the class did not
move to the next stage in the learning process until each and every student dominates the
last one. Instead of failing students, the school gave priority to the child who fell back,
the Barbiana School privileged the "weak" and those labeled as "faults." The Barbiana
School is an example of how educational institutions, especially those run by the Church,
can consciously choose to educate the less privileged as part of a genuine option for the
poor: But there was a child who had no background, who was slow or lazy (sic), was
made to feel like the favorite He would be treated the way his teachers treat the best
student in the class. It seemed that the school was only for him. Until he could make
himself understood, the others would not continue
When the intermediate school started in Vicchio, some kids from the city came to
Barbiana. Only those who have failed of course.
The Barbiana School favored an educational system that deals with children necessarily;
a system that does not surrender easily in the child:
You woke up at night thinking about him and tried to invent new ways to teach him -
ways that suit his needs. You should go get him from home if he did not show up for
class.
Being faithful to the message of the Gospels, an important source of reading at the
Barbiana School, Milani and her students opted for an educational process in which one
improves one's learning by communicating what one learns to others. Those who did not
keep up were helped to learn by their peers who, in turn, improved their understanding of
what was learned through the effort involved in passing it on to others.
"Communicate your ideas to others allows you to clarify and develop them"(Bonanno,
2002). Barbiana's experience also confirms that people probably learn from your peers
from social backgrounds similar to those of teachers who are differentially located from
them.
The subject of communication becomes very important in this context. Communication
skills that allow one to become involved in cooperative efforts with others become an
important feature of an education for citizenship. Writing becomes a skill that has to be
mastered, something that, according to the authors, public schools of the type that failed
them, do not teach. The authors point to the claim that "writers are born and are not made",
to which they reply:

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"Meanwhile, you get a salary as an Italian teacher." The authors then go on to illustrate
the collective steps they take when writing, eliminating superfluous words, redundancies,
excessively long sentences and "two any concepts that are forced into a sentence.
Have something important to say, something useful for all or at least for many. Know
who you are writing for. Gather all the useful materials. Find a logical pattern with which
to develop the theme. Delete every useless word. Remove every word that is not used in
spoken language. Never set the time limits. Due to the emphasis placed on clear
communication for collective learning and action, the School of Barbiana, undoubtedly
at the insistence of Lorenzo Milani, devoted much attention to language learning and not
only to the Italian language. Milani drew on her family resources and other contributions
to obtain fees for her students to travel and work abroad. The funds were intended to
cover travel expenses while the students had to work in the receiving countries, doing all
kinds of jobs, for Cover your daily needs expenses. Their experience abroad was meant
to allow them to learn the language of the receiving country. The idea of traveling abroad
to expand their horizons and learn languages was in line with Milani's belief in the need
for people to transcend national and regional borders in order to gain that sense of
cosmopolitanism that makes them citizens of the world. And it would be worth noting
that the choice of countries visited by the students was broad enough to incorporate both
Europeans and North African Contexts.
It is the kind of subject to which Milani returns in the "Letter to the Judges" where he
discredits what he considers to be the archaic and replaced notion of national borders for
what bloody wars, which cost the lives of the working class and peasants, They were
fought. The arguments about border crossing are still the most relevant today, especially
with respect to the development, through migration, of multi-ethnic societies and the
amount of racism and xenophobia that it often generates (see Macedo and Gounari, 2005).
Learning a language spoken by the people of the country involved was also in keeping
with another characteristic of the Barbiana School that distinguished it from the Scuola
dell'Obbligo. The Barbiana School sought to provide a meaning culturally meaningful
education, an education that poses a strong connection between learning and life.
The public school not only discriminates against working-class students by teaching and
examining knowledge that is culturally alien to them, it also teaches knowledge that is
hardly relevant to one's daily life. The boys argue that many Giannis were expelled from
the system in part because of curricular content that was static to the extent that "... a child
hears the same things repeated to boredom." It was a culturally skewed curriculum and
very far from the Gianni's life experiences and interests: Gianni could not be forced to
put the h in the verb "to have." But he knew many things about the adult world, about
jobs and family relationships and the lives of the people of the cities. Sometimes, at night,
he joined his father at the Communist Party meeting or at the town meeting. You, with
your Greeks and your Romans, made him hate history, but we, going through World War
II, they could hold him for hours without a break In addition, the official knowledge was
in direct conflict with Gianni: On the gymnastics test, the teacher threw a ball at us and
said: "Play basketball." We did not know how. With contempt: "My poor children." He
is also one of you. The ability to handle a conventional ritual seemed so vital to him. He
told the director that they had not given us any "physical education exam" and we should
re-take the exams in the fall. Any of us could climb an oak.

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Once there we could let our hands go and cut a two-hundred-pound branch with an ax.
Then we could drag him through the snow to our mother's door. The boys from Barbiana
preferred a general curriculum. They were against specialization principles, as this would
limit Gianni's chances for further learning and growth.
Current events and controversies were followed assiduously, articles were collectively
compromised, their underlying ideological positions were identified and unmasked and
this critical literacy exercise often elicited collective responses from students working in
tandem with their mentor who should have encouraged to each of his proteges to be a
driver that no one could step on.
By engaging in such controversies, Barbiana's students sharpened their critical citizenship
skills not only by "reading the word and the world" (Freire and Macedox, 1987), but also,
in the words of community educator Freirean, Paul V. Taylor (1993). ), "Writing the word
and the world"

2. Questions
TRUE/FALSE:
1. According to the article “Critical Pedagogy and Citizenship”, one of the most
important figures that inspired the critical citizenship approach was Lorenzo Milani.
TRUE
2. According to Lorenzo Milani article: “Adult and youth education in san Donato di
Calenzano”, women could participate in the educational activities. FALSE
3. According to Lorenzo Milani, austerity is based on the notion that working-class
students need to work hard (‘blood, sweat and tears’), by virtue of daddy’s children.
TRUE
4. Regarding the article “Critical Pedagogy and Citizenship”, the Barbiana School
didn’t favour an educational system that deals with children necessarily, a system that
does not surrender easily in the child. FALSE

MULTIPLE CHOICE:
1. Related to the article “Critical Pedagogy and Citizenship”, which of the
following statements about Lorenzo Milani is correct?
a) He founded the school of Barbiana.
b) He was against Mussolini’s fascist ideas.
c) He was born to wealthy family.
d) All of them are correct.

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2. According to “Lorenzo Milani: Adult and youth education in san Donato di
Calenzano”, one of the founding principles of this education was:
a) Education – Church separation.
b) Develop drama skills.
c) Develop conversation skills.
d) Fighting against sexist education.

3. Regarding to Lorenzo Milani: The assumption here is that even those parties
that ostensibly represent the interests of the […] are the preserve of the dominant
classes.
a) Milani approach and the students at Barbiana
b) entire working class, the socialist and communist parties
c) socialist parties

4. According to the article “Critical Pedagogy and Citizenship”, the Barbiana

school:
a) Sought to provide a culturally meaningful education, an education that poses a strong
connection between learning and life.
b) Is an example of how educational institutions, especially those run by the Church,
can consciously choose to educate the less privileged as part of a genuine option for the
poor.
c) Involved long hours of study throughout the week, including weekends the concern
for bridging the "cultural capital" divide invites parallels with Gramsci's defense of a
Unitarian boarding school in which seniors are also encouraged to teach the youngest.
d) All of them are correct.