Search

Françoise Dolto, a French psychoanalyst of the twentieth century, has an important role not only in the history of the psychoanalytic movement but also in the history of education, because she gives new attention to early childhood starting from the encounter between psychoanalysis and pediatrics. Her interest in education matured during the sixties of the twentieth century when she understood the importance of prevention in the treatment of pathologies of children, teenagers and adults. Her pedagogy has a non-traditional and transdisciplinary approach and is defined as "education medicine", where education is a search for truth and a commitment, for the adults, to establish a relationship based on listening to the other, to the person that the child is. Dolto’s best heredity is the Maison Verte, now spread around the world, also in Italy, with the aim to disseminate the theories and the clinical practices born from her activities.

Through a historical reading of the Luigi Stefanini’s philosophy (Treviso 1891 - Padua 1956), this paper presents the democratic theory of education that he elaborates in the years of the Reconstruction. Stefanini proposes a personalistic deduction of democracy, where the educational act becomes a place of event of the social person. Education for democracy coincides with a path of spiritual growth that causes the person in the individual and that has a mystical foundation: first the ego experiences itself and then meets others as similar but singular subjects. In this educational process the teacher is very important, because he acts as an intermediary between the disciple and the absolute Being, helping the student to learn himself and to become the author of his own life. In the context of the educational personalism, since democracy is a form of community life, schools must keep people and communities together as an alternative to the visions that massify man. The school-community must become a place for perfecting existence and democratic education for the common good beyond selfish interests. Educating good is for Stefanini educating a good life that is never referred to the individual, but to the subject-person who realizes his identity together with other subjects and within a community horizon. Stefanini’s personalism creates a pedagogy of the different where the school must be constituted according to the principle of personalization of educational processes, becoming an elective place of equality and of a personalistic foundation of democracy. The proposal for an education that restores the primacy of the person over the individual in the realization of a community and plural democracy, arouses interest and curiosity in the late-modern era where the education is increasingly becoming an individual and solitary enterprise.

Between the Sixties and the Seventies a youth movement of protest spread in Italy, targeting the society and its most important institutions: the church and the family. Simultaneously together with the student movement, there was a counterculture phenomenon, the hippie movement, that wanted the death of the family and chose alternative and unregulated lifestyles as forms of challenge to parental authority. Many young people decided to flee from their families to go and live in the so-called “community”, where educational practices were experienced. They were educational practices that proposed an alternative model to the patriarchal and bourgeois family, whose authoritarian model of education was condemned. The hippie movement, also called children of flowers, created a pedagogical utopia that criticized the family for its despotic authoritarianism, for its amoral familism and for its tendency to become an emotional prison that stifled freedom of expression, creating a permanent generational conflict. In this way, the family pedagogy reflected differently on the difficult educational relationships in the family of those years.

tenzionalità vicariante. Si tratta dell’istanza costitutiva dell’esperienza e della coscienza educativa; il suo senso viene approfondito ricorrendo alle categorie di consegna, di invio e di restituzione. L’educazione è un evento d’essere e di senso e all’origine della consegna v’è sempre l’attestazione di una personalità spirituale, di chi sceglie d’esser definito dalla comunicazione di un ideale di vita buona. Ora, la prima condizione che la rende efficace è che essa presenti l’ideale di vita nell’aspetto che lo renda carico di fascino; diviene così esperienza di bellezza, promessa di fioritura umana. La seconda condizione è la possibilità di una personalizzazione dello stesso ideale; che s’incarni in forme nuove, trovando e facendo vivere suoi aspetti latenti nel passato, è forse la forma autentica di restituzione. This essay shows the outline of a phenomenology of education whose core is the institution of the vicarious intentionality. It has to do with the constitutive desire of experience and the educative conscience, its meaning is made deeper by referring to the categories of delivery, dispatch and return. Education is an event of being and meaning and at the origin of delivery there is always the statement and gift of the spiritual personality belonging to he who chooses to be defined by the communication of an ideal of “good life”. The first condition that makes this communication possible is that it must introduce the ideal of an ethical life based on its fascinating aspect because it activates beauty and it represents a promise of human flourishing. The second condition is the chance for a personalization of the same ideal: it should reappear in new forms therefore allowing an authentic return process.