Neither Catholic Nor Fascist

Luigi Meneghello’s Vision of Education

Abstract

Fiori italiani by Luigi Meneghello is an exemplary account of schooling during Fascism, highlighting its rhetoric, abstraction and lack of an overall outline that would make its meaning explicit. Starting from the essential question, ‘What is an education?’, the author outlines his earliest experiences of learning  in the well-known microcosm of his homeland Malo, revisited with his usual irony, and then reviews his high school years in Vicenza. He comes to the conclusion that Fascism failed to deeply penetrate the Italian education system, merely accentuating the propaganda aspects through teachers who seemed like ‘puppets full of sawdust’. The perspective of the storytelling, even if distant in time, has an intimately involved gaze, always in balance between the need to understand and the awareness that there will be new questions and doubts to face. Indeed he himself, as a professor for 33 years at the University of Reading, reflected on the true meaning of education and chose to ‘build a structure’ in his own way rather than to ‘function’ within a predetermined structure, following the example of Antonio Giuriolo, the partisan who changed his life forever embodying the perfect union of culture and firm moral principles.