What Catholic educators can learn from the radical Christianity and critical pedagogy of Don Lorenzo Milani

Abstract

This paper explores some of the ideas expressed in or associated with the work of Don Lorenzo Milani and the School of Barbiana and discusses them in the light of the teachings of the gospels. It draws out the implications of these ideas for a critical education in the Christian spirit. The focus throughout is on Christian education for social justice.

Keywords:

• Catholic education
• preferential option for the poor
• empowerment
• knowledge as common heritage
• different gifts
• the duty to say ‘no’

Notes on contributors

Michael Grech studied philosophy in Malta and the United Kingdom. In philosophy his main interests are metaphysics and philosophy of language. His extra-academic interests include religion, politics, various social issues and the relation between these areas.

Peter Mayo is Professor in the Department of Education Studies, Faculty of Education, University of Malta. His most recent books are Learning with Adults. A Critical pedagogical Introduction (with Leona English, Sense, 2012) which won the 2013 Houle Award for literature in adult education and Lorenzo Milani, The School of Barbiana and the Struggle for Social Justice (with F. Batini and A. Surian, Peter Lang, 2014).

Notes

1. Milani was later to distinguish himself for his austerity both as a Seminarian and as a diocesan priest.

2. Speciale TG1 (Rai – Italian State Broadcasting Station Channel 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_KJuVkZC2w (accessed 3 November 2013).

3. He felt that God spoke to him through his conscience (Corzo 2011). Parallels were drawn with Socrates in this regard (Centro Formazione e Ricerca Don Milani e Scuola di Barbiana 2008, 36). This spurred Milani into action, often against the status quo, before the usual admonition by the Archbishop who would order him to stop. Milani would acquiesce (Gesualdi 2011, 12).

4. Milani had an ambivalent attitude towards socialism in general and towards the Italian Communist Party (the largest in Western Europe) in particular. In his ‘Letter to the Judges’, he calls ‘socialism’ the ‘highest attempt of humankind to give, already on this earth, justice and equality to the poor’ (Milani 1988b, 26). In a 1950 letter to Pipetta, Milani declared that he shared with communists the struggle to combat the subjugation and abuse of the oppressed and redress the various injustices they suffer (Guzzo 1998, 123). Yet, he claimed that he would have parted company with the party the moment these goals were reached (Guzzo 1998, 123). Moreover, he frequently took the Communist Party and the Catholic Church to task for vying with each other to win over youngsters by what he regarded as frivolous activities such as dances and football rather than investing in a broad education.

5. We are indebted to Professor Mary Darmanin of the University of Malta, who has researched Catholic education (see Darmanin 2013), for the accuracy of this statistic.

6. Quotes will be taken from the The New King James Version 1990, New York, 1990, American Bible Society.

7. There are enough indications by now to make the reader realise that this was not merely a contemplative school, based on the medieval model of the contemplative life, but very much a school in and not simply for the world, a concept which coincided with the notion of a Church not for but in the world.

8. We thank Joseph Bezzina for this insight.

9. This approach was to be repeated in the classic text, Lettera a una Professoressa, whose official authors are eight boys from the school, and which focused not only on the Italian public school system but, in the words of the Pasolini, on Italian society at large. My translation from the original in Italian. http://www.chille.it/progetti-in-corso/progetto-don-milani-lettera-a-una-professoressa/ (accessed 3 November 2013).

10. The Lettera was used as a set text in a critical sociology of education Open University course in the 1970s (Dale 2014).