Italian academic pedagogical magazines in the history of education in the XX century

The paper reconstructs the main tendencies of the Italian educational thought using the academic pedagogical magazines as a mirror of the scientific and political developments through the years. Whereas many were the pedagogical and school journals in the XIXth century, written by teachers and educationalists, aimed at ameliorating teachers’ culture and also at defending their economic rights, the first academic journals came out only at the beginning of the XXth century: directed by famous professors of general pedagogy, they were the expressions of the late Positivism, of Herbartism and of Neo-Idealism. Fascism then gradually closed or extinguished the independent journals. After the Second world war no academic pedagogical magazine existed. The ones that were set up between 1946 and 1955 are still living. They were expressions of the pedagogical tendencies of the time: the Catholic Rassegna di pedagogia of Giuseppe Flores D’Arcais, Pedagogia e vita of Mario Casotti and the Salesian Orientamenti pedagogici ; the lay Scuola e città of Ernesto Codignola, which published and commented Dewey’s articles; Riforma della Scuola, the pedagogical magazine of the Communist Party. They published learned articles on epistemology, school policy, didactics and history of education and they were the arena of relevant scientific disputes and of battles on school policy, particularly about the teaching of religion and the statute of private schools and about the Reform of compulsory middle school (1962).