Ernesto Codignola
Ernesto Codignola (23 June 1885 – 28 September 1965) was an Italian pedagogue and historian. He collaborated with Giovanni Gentile and Giuseppe Lombardo Radice in the drafting of the Gentile Reform and was one of the founders of the publisher La Nuova Italia.
Biography
First of eight brothers, he was born from a father of Brescian origin and a mother from Genoa. He attended medical school for two years, and then moved to the second year of philosophy at the University of Pisa, where he had Gentile as one of his teachers. He graduated in 1909.
In the same year he married Anna Maria Melli, with whom, after 1945, he started the Pestalozzi School-City in the working-class district of Santa Croce in Florence, which was distinguished by its Deweyan spirit.
He obtained the habilitation for higher education at the Normale in Pisa, then began to move for the exercise of teaching: Palermo (1910–12), Assisi (1912–14), Lucca (1914–18).
At the end of 1923 he moved to the Istituto Superiore di Magistero in Florence, where he became director until 1936, and professor, until 1954–55.
In 1925, he was among the signatories of the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals. The Lateran Pacts, the appointment of Cesare Maria De Vecchi and the suppression of the Ente Nazionale di Cultura (one of the ten associations born in those years to combat illiteracy) to which he himself had devoted much energy, led him to an initial detachment from Fascism, which at first he tried to influence from within, as evidenced by many of his writings of the time, and finally abandoned openly, siding with the militant anti-fascism, where he became one of the points of reference, by virtue of his ties with Benedetto Croce, Luigi Russo and Piero Calamandrei. His son Tristano was among the founders of liberal socialism.
Through Codignola's influence a decisive cultural shift occurred in Italian pedagogy, from a hegemony of idealism, to a decisive presence of the secular American pragmatism.
Works
- La pedagogia rivoluzionaria (1919)
- Problemi didattici (1919)
- Educatori moderni (1926)
- Educazione liberatrice (1946)
- Le scuole nuove e i loro problemi (1946)
- Illuministi, giansenisti e giacobini nell'Italia del Settecento (1947)
- Un esperimento di scuola attiva: la scuola-città Pestalozzi (1954)
