«No More Textbooks»: A Publishing Mishap In The Cultural Revolution Of The Sixties

This study aims to outline how the understanding of textbooks as a pedagogical tool changed during the late Sixties in Italy. Even though it is renown that textbooks can be valuable historical sources, we can also consider the absence of textbooks as a source itself to understand a cultural atmosphere and a specific pedagogical view. As a matter of fact, there have been times and places in which textbooks were not recognized as effective pedagogical tools and were consequently rejected by many teachers. In Italy, an emblematic case was that of the MCE (Cooperative Education Association), an association of teachers born in the Fifties and addressed by the famous writer Gianni Rodari as the most progressive Italian pedagogical association at the time. Teachers of the Association believed that textbooks were ideological instruments which prevented children from exercising critical thinking and creative skills. Mario Lodi, one of the most relevant MCE members, wrote that there had been an attempt by MCE teachers to improve textbooks, an attempt unsupported by historical evidence so far. However, the study of the correspondence and the documentation from the Giulio Einaudi Editore Historical Archive has given proof of an unpublished MCE project of textbooks for the elementary school. Dating back to year 1966, the project enlisted the collaboration of many members of the publishing house and relevant members of the Association, including Mario Lodi himself, Giuseppe Tamagnini and Bruno Ciari, with the participation of Gianni Rodari as well. It consisted of three different collections: two for the children – one of which, the “Biblioteca di Lavoro”, was meant to help the children focus on their own experiences, learn how to edit and assemble documents, and make reports – and one for the teacher, which showed how to lead the students in a collective work, following the interests of each of them in spite of the topic given by the teacher. As mentioned above, these collections remained unpublished, as Einaudi decided to abandon the project for financial reasons. Yet, had Einaudi, by any chance, decided to continue the project, he would no longer have found anyone willing to carry it forward, due to the many divisive contrasts, both political and ideological, inside the MCE, in the context of an increasingly heated political debate, with the wider circulation of left­wing policies and an ever­tighter link between school renewal, fight against authority and class struggle. The view of the Association consequently evolved: it was no longer enough to renew textbooks, but it was time to completely abolish them as they were instruments of repression. In conclusion, the documents preserved in the archives have allowed to discover an unfulfilled project, and the reasons for its end might have helped to clarify the pedagogical impact of the cultural and social movements of 1968, highlighting once more the relationship between education and politics.