Conference Agenda

In the 1950s Italy was living a historical turn in society. The economic miracle led to improvements in people’s habits, with television, cinema, and radio that revolutionized free time. The need for general knowledge in a wide variety of subjects is reflected in the distribution of encyclopedias for both adults and children (Boero, De Luca 2012). Pacifico Fiori worked along these publishing lines to produce books that helped young readers discover new worlds beyond their own. La storia del Far West (1951) was published in the book series Ragazzi d’oggi, with stories to be read outside the spaces of formal education. According to the paratext, the series was meant to challenge the growing presence of movies and comics considered “bad literature” for younger generations. It seamlessly educated young readers' “brain” and “heart”, but still from the point of view of an Italian society that maintained the conquering ideology of the Fascist regime.
Fiori’s book was translated into English as Far West in 1969 by Susan Cannata for Rylee, a small British publishing company, when a new wave of investments reached books for children. Far West cannot be considered a standard translation from source text to target text. Firstly, the book concept is different: if the source presented few black-and-white illustrations with a preponderance of textual material, the target is an oversize volume with splendid colour illustrations telling a story on their own, surrounded by chunks of text. Secondly, the chapter division of the source was cut and reorganised in a chronological narration in the target that covered part of American history from Columbus to Buffalo Bill, eliminating large sections of Fiori’s text in favour of a different concept of entertainment through reading. Historical facts involving Indigenous peoples and the European colonizers show a different approach to the topics of gender (women ancillary to men’s enterprises vs. men as settlers, warriors, and conquerors), race (natives vs. settlers), power (Indian chiefs vs. notable European colonizers). Education is not part of the narrative, emphasizing the aim of source and target text to mix knowledge and pleasure avoiding didacticism. This approach seems to support Chartier’s vision of children’s literature as a primary source of entertainment in view of more complex readings. Nevertheless, the translation theory by Venuti on “domestication” provides the basis to read Fiori’s case study as an example of the colonization of language that – from an education point of view – manipulates the information to appease the target culture of British readers. Upon first reading, the source text is unbalanced towards the colonizers, and even when there is a vivid description of the Natives’ habits and traditions, the colonial view triumphs in the conclusion with the ‘natural’ inclusion of Natives in the new white people society. The target text, on the other hand, seems to maintain a descriptive character that reorganizes and even integrates the knowledge on the Natives presented in the source text, constraining the colonizing view of Fiori’s text towards a seemingly more objective approach to Otherness.

The 1920s and 1930s were marked by the creation of organizations linked to eugenic ideals in both Brazil and Argentina. In this context, teachers engaged in eugenic discourses to debate the nature of intelligence and learning in school-age children. In this interaction between eugenicists and educators, discourses of intelligence racialized children's bodies and established a model of normality associated with the image of the “ideal student”. In this paper, we focus on the categories recorded by schools in the “ficha escolar” (school chart) – a genre of classification that was transformed based on this new approach. As part of the apparatus developed to map each child's ability to learn, the “Fichas escolares” also began to classify them according to criteria such as race, gender, and class. These classifications have gone beyond the school environment and can be seen both in the public debate and in spaces such as the Brazilian League of Mental Hygiene in Brazil and the Asociación Argentina de Biotipología, Eugenesia y Medicina Social in Argentina. We investigate official magazines from these organizations and articles written by teachers to understand how eugenic discourse was translated into classifications and expectations that linked education, labor, and the idea of preventive hygiene.

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, a lively debate took place in Europe concerning girls' education and girls' access to school. In many states, legislation stipulated the possibility or even the obligation for boys and girls to attend school, because school had become a powerful instrument of transmission of national ideology.

Even in Italy, after 1861, legislation established compulsory education for boys and girls, thereby recognizing the right of girls to attend public training and education, at the same times and in the same places as boys. The rate of school evasion remained high and this phenomenon particularly affected girls for various reasons: poor families did not send their daughters to school, because they were useful in domestic trades, were used in fieldwork, and were in great demand in industry. Moreover, the prejudice remained that female education was useless and superfluous, or even harmful.

Within this framework, a lively debate developed concerning the need to educate girls, the purpose of their education, and in particular the issue of co-education: this word indicated the possibility of creating mixed classes for boys and girls in schools. According to some thinkers, co-education was harmful both because it would make relations between the sexes in the classroom turbulent and undisciplined, and because females did not need to learn the same subjects as males. Other thinkers, on the other hand, advocated coeducation as a means of fostering more mature relations between the sexes and as the right of girls to an education equal to that of boys.

Ministerial curricula, on the other hand, provided different subjects for boys and girls: for example, home economics, agriculture for girls, and carpentry for boys. At that time, however, the experiments of the new schools and active schools proposed educational curricula that were often organized with coeducation, just as the International League for New Education (New Education) included coeducation as one of its basic demands at the founding congress of Calais in 1921.

This contribution proposes an analysis of the debate about co-education (1911-1922) in the pages of the Italian pedagogical journal La Coltura Popolare: it presented interesting reflections to the public by comparing the Italian debate with initiatives and debates occurring in other Western countries. The analysis shows the presence of very diversified positions, the implementation of various experiments in some countries, and the connection of this issue with other problems. It was linked with very complex questions: what were the objectives of female education? Were these aims the same as those of male education, and so should the job opportunities also have been the same? Would female education have taken women away from their family duties? Should mixed classes have been entrusted to female teachers or male teachers? And with what salary? As is evident, the topic of co-education was intertwined with complex pedagogical, but also social, political, and economic issues.