The «New School» of Basilicata in Mid-twentieth Century. Arturo Arcomano’s Contribution for a Different Education in Southern Italy

Abstract

This article falls within a branch of studies aimed at highlighting the experiences of some neglected protagonists of Italian education through their professional writings. Indeed, school journals and records give an insight into the transformations that the teaching profession and school culture have undergone throughout the years. From such a historiographical perspective, this contribution highlights the «new school» experiment carried out by the teacher Arturo Arcomano (1927-2007) in a small town in Basilicata, a region of Southern Italy, in the mid-twentieth century. By looking at the material held in the private archive of this educator, scholar, professor and politician, particularly his school journals, as well as at the notebooks and school papers produced by his pupils, we can get a sense of the «new life» breathed through the school of Roccanova, where Arcomano applied the teaching methodologies that were becoming popular in those years, like the use of free writing and Freinet’s printing press at school. The Arcomano case study enables us to understand both the resistance and the push towards this experimentation, which was based on a «different» pedagogical culture, and action intended to fit the environmental context. The use of the sources that can be found in Arcomano’s personal archive on the one hand enables us to define the human and professional profile of the teacher, and on the other, contributes to the reconstruction of the renovation process that affected education in Southern Italy in the mid-twentieth century.