Textbooks for Primary Schools

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The picture (10 x 14 cm) is in the reading book for the third class: Lucia Maggia, Serenità, Milano, Edizioni A. Mondadori, 1925 Serenità (terza classe), sesta edizione, 196 pp.

The pictures of this volume are by Enrico Mauro Pinochi. In the ministerial relation by the Lombardo Radice Commission, we read that: «The reading book by Lucia Maggia is excellent. The pictures are full of humaneness and truth. It is so rare to find, in reading books, characters of children that are not only the personification of good and bad, but rather represent what each soul is: a mix of goodness and faults, of which education must take into account».
This is an example of the rich on line material that is offered by the data base of pictures DIA (which is available within the portal of the Agenzia Nazionale per lo sviluppo dell’Autonomia Scolastica-ex Indire in Florence, Italy), where textbooks (school manuals, “sussidiari”, reading books and so on) are present in a large number.

We should mention, with regard to the reading books, that among 459 texts presented by publishers, the Commission definitively rejected a good 222. The other 237 were divided into five categories (but the categories became four, in the relation which was sent to the Ministry of Education)

In the first group (noteworthy books for artistic and didactic value, and well respondent to the spirit of new programmes) – we read in the report for reading books – the Commission has placed 32 works. Among these, the great part has to be corrected in some parts, according to the programmes, and to be presented again within a year for a plain check of the corrections made. In the second group (good and worthy of attention books, as it results from the diverse judgements, but which need a larger re-elaboration according to the programmes; they can be adopted for the school year 1924-1925, but should be presented again next year for the definitive judgement) the Commission has placed 77 works. In the third group (deserving books but rejected as textbooks for primary schools in the daytime, even though they are useful as reward-books, as books for libraries, or textbooks for special schools) there are 32 books. In the fourth group (somewhat good books, but which cannot even temporarily be used in schools because some serious lack or errors, as it emerges from single judgements; they can be presented again as reading books within a year, after revising and correcting; anyway in the new evaluation they will be considered as a new production) there are 16 books. In the fifth group (books with many or some good qualities, but also errors to remove; for the school year 1924-1925 they can be used in the schools where they have been already adopted, but they have, some completely, some in great part, renewed) there are 80 (cfr. Ascenzi-Sani 2005, p. 289).

Judgements about the history and geography manuals were firm all the same: of 317 examined volumes, 212 were approved; 9 definitively rejected; 71 temporarily accepted and only for the school year 1924-25, but on the condition that they should be presented again for the definitive approval, after introducing the changes indicated by the Commission.

More rigid was the selection of the “sussidiari”, of the manuals of arithmetic, bookkeeping and religion. On the whole, the “Sussidiari” were judged to be superficial and based on merely factual knowledge, not at all suitable for stimulating «the natural liveliness of children», and, for these reasons, they were in large part rejected (see Ascenzi-Sani 2005, p. 214). The manuals of arithmetic and bookkeeping had rather a more favourable judgement, in fact the Lombardo Radice Commission esteemed that «about one half of them was non respondent with the basics of a good didactics, deficient in communicatory form and linguistic propriety» (see Ascenzi-Sani 2005, p. 151).

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