Giuseppe Lombardo Radice in the early 20th century

Evelina Scaglia

The first steps of the young Giuseppe Lombardo Radice

Born on 24 June 1879 in Catania, a city on the island of Sicily in Southern Italy, and recorded in the registry office on 28 June, Giuseppe Lombardo Radice rightfully belonged to that generation of young Italians born in the 1880s, who experienced the disquiet of not having been able to participate in the Italian Risorgimento, leading them to choose a militant intellectual commitment (Chios- so 1983, 2019).

Since childhood and adolescence, he had begun to perceive, as a result of various experiences, the nature of education as a concrete problem: he became a guide in the play and studies of his peers, who like himself lived near the port of Messina, the Sicilian city to which his family had moved for his father’s work; he acted as older brother to his five cousins who had been orphaned by the death of their mother Nicolina; he was a model student in the local classical high school, where teachers and students joined together in happy attempts at active education and a rediscovery of the popular culture (Lombardo Radice 1927, pp. 67–70).

His first experiences as a tutor and, later, in Firenze as a teacher between 1901 and 1902 at the Catholic private boarding school ‘Le Querce’ run by the Barnabite fathers, as well as in 1902 as a volunteer educator in his free time at the ‘Collegio degli orfani dei marinai’ (a boarding school for sailors’ orphans), prompted him to begin formulating pedagogical reflections on the relationship between freedom and responsibility, and the continuity of educational activity between school and family, taking as his point of reference the ideas outlined by his friend Giovanni Gentile in his essay Del concetto scientifico di pedagogia [On the Scientific Concept of Pedagogy, 1900], with which the birth of pedagogical Actualism is usually identified (Lombardo Radice 1927, pp. 74–76).

Having completed his postgraduate studies in Firenze and obtained his diploma in Philosophy with ‘full marks and honours’ at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa in 1903, he began to work in the school sector. For two years he was a substitute teacher of Italian and Latin in the first class of the ginnasio [middle school], first at Adernò in the province of Catania (1903–1904), then at Arpino in the province of Frosinone (1904–1905). Having attained a tenured teaching post in Pedagogy in the scuole normali [schools for the initial training of elementary teachers] through the competitive selection process, he wandered like so many other young teachers from one city to another, moving from Foggia (1905–1906) to Palermo (1906–1907 and 1907–1908), and then to Messina for just a few months in 1908, because of a terrible earthquake. He was transferred to Catania, where he taught until 1911 (Lombardo Radice 1927, pp. 78–81).

It was at this historical juncture, dominated by criticism of Giovanni Giolitti’s government and the polemic against Freemasonry, that Lombardo Radice had the idea of establishing a journal that would act as a ‘banner of educational reform’ under the title Nuovi Doveri [New Duties], with the aim of addressing school problems – i.e. the formative nature of middle schools, the emancipation of the working classes, secular schools, private school initiatives – as a ‘national question’ (Lombardo Radice 1907, pp. 6–7).

The experience gained through Nuovi Doveri was soon flanked by another area of cultural commitment, coinciding with scholastic-educational publications, which saw the launch in 1908 of Sandron Publishing House’s series Studi pedagogici. Collezione dei Nuovi Doveri [Pedagogical Studies. Collection of the New Duties] and in 1910 of a second series entitled Pedagogisti ed educatori antichi e moderni [Pedagogists and Ancient and Modern Educators], which included historical-educational studies and classics of European pedagogical thought such as Comenius’s Didattica Magna [Great Didactics] that were still little-known in Italy (Chiosso 2014, pp. 216–220).

On 22 September 1910, Giuseppe Lombardo Radice married Gemma Harasim in the setting of Fiume (a city in present-day Croatia, then under Austro-Hungarian rule). They would go on to have three children: Giuseppina (1911), Laura (1913) and Lucio (1916). Gemma proved to be one of her husband’s most influential collaborators (Cantatore 2022, pp. 7–35) and played a mediating role with the pedagogical culture of Central Europe and the North Adriatic region, which was particularly appreciated by Giuseppe.

The following year marked an important turning point in Lombardo Radice’s career: he published Il concetto dell’educazione e le leggi della formazione spirituale: saggio di pedagogia filosofica [The Concept of Education and the Spiritual Formation’s Laws: Essay of Philosophical Pedagogy] with Sandron Publishing House and came first in the competition for the chair of Pedagogy at the Royal University of Catania, thanks to the support of his friend Giovanni Gentile (Romano 1984, p. 128).

In the three-year period 1913–1916, through the triptych of volumes Lezioni di didattica e ricordi di esperienza magistrale – Come si uccidono le anime – L’ideale educativo e la scuola nazionale [Lessons in Didactics and Memoirs of Teaching Life – How to Kill Souls – The Educational Ideal and the National School], Giuseppe Lombardo Radice promoted the foundations of a new idea of pedagogy that was centred on the educational relationship between teacher and pupil, closely linked to a theory of the school as a ‘riforma in cammino’ [reform on the way] and a democratic conception of the nation (Charnitzky 2001, pp. 91–191; Chiosso 2019, pp. 233–255).