Don Lorenzo Milani and his international impact in education and beyond

Abstract

In this article, I shall first demonstrate the extent of Don Milani’s and his students’ resonance in various contexts outside Italy, notably 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 education 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 institutions 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 pervasive militarization culture which they challenge by reading history against the grain.