Don Lorenzo Milani and His International Impact in Education and Beyond

Author: Peter Mayo

Abstract

In this article, I shall first demonstrate the extent of Don Milani’s and his students’ resonance in various contexts outside Italy, no-tably Spain, Malta, Turkey, Latin America and North America, Australia and the UK. I will then move on to locate Milani and his students’ work in appropriate “disciplinary schools”, notably that of Critical Pedagogy and Critical Sociology of Education. I will demonstrate the relevance of their body of work to such areas of inquiry as a differentiated schooling within a selective public edu-cation system where social selection on the basis of economic and cultural capital is camouflaged by the ideology of meritocracy, the development not only of trenchant criticism of bourgeois institu-tions such as obligatory schools but the positing of alternative possibilities. Thus I shall highlight their interpretation of critique in its German sense (kritik) of also including possibilities. I will also tackle their denunciation of war and the currently all perva-sive militarization culture which they challenge by reading history against the grain.

Keywords: Don Lorenzo Milani, Critical education, Sociology of caring

DOI: https://doi.org/10.13131/unipi/axg7-at74

Notes on contributors