The phenomenological turn in education: the legacy of Piero Bertolini’s theory

Abstract At the end of the Fifties, an Italian scholar, Piero Bertolini, provided a phenome-nology-based theoretical framework for rethinking education that largely anticipat-ed the phenomenological turn that was to impact social sciences in the following decades. By founding his proposal on Husserl’s phenomenology, Bertolini pro-posed a major theoretical shift in educational theory, research and practice: from “what reality (i.e. natural facts, other peoples’ behaviour, traditions, established so-cial order, everyday routines, early years etc.) does to people” to “what people make or can make of it”. This anti-deterministic stance is probably the best known side of his work, yet Bertolini never claimed an omnipotent mind nor did he con-ceive the socialisation process as occurring in a social, cultural or material vacuum. On the contrary, he stressed the constitutive role of reality on whatever a mind can make of it. By outlining Bertolini’s main theoretical claims and discussing his ground-breaking contribution to the 20th century scholarship in education, this es-say introduces this special issue dedicated to the contemporary relevance of his theory of education. Keywords: education, Husserl, intentionality, life-world, natural attitude, phe-nomenology, phenomenological pedagogy, social constructionism, socio-materiality, theoretical attitude