«Poor old semi-illiterates, poor human wrecks»: women infant school teachers in early twentieth-century Italy

Abstract

This paper examines the training of infant-school teachers in the early twentieth century. In Italy, this occupational category was long overlooked by legislators, largely due to the state’s lack of interest in pre-school education and the institutions tasked with delivering it. The few laws on infant school education that were introduced in the nineteenth century were not particularly impactful. Rather, they confirmed the status of infant schools as welfare or charitable institutions. Consequently, they entailed no new investment in the teachers who worked in these schools. The teachers thus lacked both training and proper legal and economic status. This had a negative impact on their motivation and meant that they were often poorly prepared for their work from the educational and cultural perspectives. Only at the beginning of the twentieth century did the Ministry of Public Education approve regulations on obtaining a qualification to teach in infant schools. However, being qualified only became compulsory during the fascist period. Here, I set out to investigate whether the professional training pathways established during the Giolitti and fascist eras (Practical Teacher Training Schools, Method Schools, Teacher Training Schools) led to a significant improvement in the training of infant-school teachers and, consequently, made infant schools less backward in terms of the quality of education and teaching they provided. Specifically, I assess whether and to what extent the new training courses enhanced infant-school teachers’ competence and their ability to understand and apply the innovations introduced by the first Italian ministerial programs for kindergartens (1914) and by the teaching methods that, in that historical period, were being developed for preschool education. To this end, I go beyond examining institutional history, also drawing on more recent historiographical approaches. My research spans contemporary ministerial reviews of the infant school sector, as well as a source that remains to be fully exploited by historical-educational research, namely journals for infant-school teachers. The latter publications themselves played a key role in the professionalisation of teachers, as studies on the topic have shown