Giovanni Gentiles Schulreform zwischen Liberalismus und Totalitarismus. Von der Revision der Schulbucher (1923) zum „Staatsbuch“ (1930)

The essay presents the figure of Giovanni Gentile, showing his philosophical and educational links with Benedetto Croce and Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, three key men of the Italian Neo-Idealism and school reform movement in the first decades of the 20th century. They were engaged in the same battle against Positivism and Herbartism, but their own political and pedagogical views were not the same: the Neo- Idealistic philosophic front had internal differences. These preliminary distinctions introduce the second part of the essay, which presents the results of the Italian historiography on the great work of revision of all the Italian School books (1923-1930). Started with Gentile and Lombardo Radice in 1923 as a powerful instrument of the neo-Idealist and progressive pedagogy to change school didactics, it ended up as a tool of Fascist regime. It renewed school textbooks, but this process was stopped by the regime. As a result the school editorial market was deeply altered already in 1924.