Meneghello e l’educazione nel Novecento, fra tradizione e innovazione

The essay reflects on some elements of the work of Luigi Meneghello from the point of view of the history of education: it compares, in fact, these elements with the evolution of the pedagogical debate and with the educational experiments present in Italy in the first half of the twentieth century. It analyses some metaphors related to culture that emerge in the texts of Meneghello and that recall similar images in the writings of pedagogies of the early twentieth century. It then examines the parallelisms present on the subject of language: the reflections and stylistic choices made by the author reflect the articulated debate that characterized the pedagogy of the first decades of the twentieth century regarding the use of dialect, the function of language as a strong element of individual and collective identity, and regarding creative writing and cooperative writing. The texts of Meneghello appear very significant in understanding clearly and fully the evolution of pedagogical reflection concerning the social and cultural context of that period.