Not a hospital that treats the healthy and turns away the sick. Calamandrei’s lesson

“I am a lawyer, but I have a habit – which perhaps stems in part from a certain Tuscan fondness for fine design – of associating legal and political concepts with images, which then help me to develop a fondness for these concepts.”

The idea that associating images with concepts helps us to form an emotional connection to them is suggested by Piero Calamandrei in a passage from his speech in defence of state schools in February 1950, published here. This is a suggestion that should be taken very seriously, because one of the tasks of those involved in education, whatever role they play, is to create contexts in which young people can move freely between their own and others’ ideas, learning to develop an appreciation for thinking independently. Learning to navigate information, data and theories; considering their sources; finding ways to discuss them with others; and verifying their reliability by recognising the blatant falsehoods and fabrications that increasingly pollute public discourse – this now constitutes a basic form of literacy necessary to assess, with ever-greater acuity and discernment, the degree of truth and the effectiveness of the concepts we use in interpreting the world around us and our own actions.

“The more profound and widespread the ignorance of the subjects, the more securely theocratic or dictatorial absolutism is maintained,” states the Florentine jurist, arguing that “all the shortcomings of democracy, even the most serious ones, can be rectified through education”. Calamandrei’s profound faith in education stems from a lofty vision of state schooling, seen as the cornerstone of the constitutional order.

“If one were to draw a comparison between the constitutional body and the human body, one would have to say that the school corresponds to those organs in the human body whose function is to create blood. The haematopoietic organs – those from which the blood originates, which renews all the other organs on a daily basis, and which carries renewal and life to all the other organs, day after day, beat by beat.” The metaphor of the school as a haematopoietic organ clearly illustrates how essential it was for him to bear in mind at all times that the full implementation of the Constitution on which he had worked would not be possible without ensuring the highest quality of public education, which should be open to all pupils, regardless of their social class.

In the early 1970s, Fiorenzo Alfieri, anticipating the law that introduced full-time schooling, promoted a pilot scheme in Turin, arguing that schools could become a decisive factor in the development of democracy if they had the capacity to ‘stir things up’, thereby reducing class discrimination. He worked with other teachers to make the schools on the outskirts of the Piedmontese capital – which were then attended mainly by the children of immigrants from southern Italy – so innovative and full of opportunities that they attracted privileged families from the city centre, who began to send their children to those schools.

“Creating blood” and “stirring the blood” are images born of a forward-looking perspective that urges us to view society as a single body, in which we cannot accept that certain organs should fall ill, because school is not “a hospital that cures the healthy and rejects the sick”, as the pupils of Barbiana, together with Don Lorenzo Milani, denounced with striking candour in 1967.