How to use the sources

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After a close historical exam, it emerges that juridical texts reflect the educational policies that are prevailing in a given historical period, as well as the same social-cultural climate that pro-duced them. For example, the analysis of dispositions given, according to parliamentary or min-isterial Commissions with regard to the approval of textbooks, makes it clear that they not only reflected the political will of the executive power, but reflected also the analysis and evaluation of schoolbooks made by experts, such as pedagogists and people working in the school of the period.

An emblematic case of use of juridical sources integrated with other kinds of documents, is the analysis of the work of the Central Commission for Textbooks which was established in 1923⁹ in the framework of the reform elaborated by Giovanni Gentile, commission which was firstly pre-sided over by the pedagogist Giuseppe Lombardo Radice.

It is very significant the comparison between the choices made by the Commission and the measures adopted by the Ministry in the field of textbooks. This is in fact an exemplary case in which the indications by the competent body (the Central Commission) did not coincide with the political trends of the governmental body (the Ministry); a situation which consequently led up – after a while, in 1928 – to the removal of the same Commission and to the governmental choice to introduce the State Single Textbook (Testo Unico di Stato) in primary schools.

9 For an in-depht study, see Anna Ascenzi, Roberto Sani (eds.), Il libro per la scuola tra idealismo e fascismo: l'opera della Commissione centrale per l'esame dei libri di testo da Giuseppe Lombardo Radice ad Alessandro Melchiori, 1923-1928, Milano, Vita e Pensiero, 2005 (in Google Books).

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