Boarding school as training ground for democracy
By Edoardo Signori and Catrien Spijkerman
In the country that invented fascism, Guido Petter starts a new kind of school shortly after the war, where students learn to stand up against injustice.
It must have felt a bit awkward for Guido Petter. There he is, barely eighteen and with only a secondary school diploma, teaching a class full of students, some of them older than him. It is autumn 1945, and Petter has become a teacher at a school he founded himself.
Only a few months before, he was still fighting the Nazis and fascists in the snowy mountains of northern Italy. Italy had been a fascist state during the war and the regime controlled the lives of all citizens, including adolescents.
It didn’t stop Petter – still a teenager at the time – from joining the partisans of Val d’Ossola, a major resistance group in northern Italy. He hid Jewish families and sabotaged enemy supply lines. He faced hunger and the loss of comrades. ‘I went in a boy, I came out a man’, he would say about that period later.
Boarding school for rebirth
After the liberation, Petter sees a world left in ruins and a generation without a future for lack of education and a roof over their heads. Many partisans have had to abandon their studies to fight and never learned a trade. Together with fellow partisans, Petter founds the Convitto della Rinascita, which translates to ‘boarding school for rebirth’. The school is specifically aimed at ex-partisans, former political prisoners, children of war victims and other disadvantaged people.
Petter and the co-founders want to approach things differently from what Petter had been used to at school. The convitto should not only educate and train students for a job, but really mould them into new citizens. The values and principles of the resistance form the basis: students are taught to recognise injustice and take action against it themselves.
The teacher isn’t the boss
Petter knows very well how education can shape a life. As a schoolboy, wearing his grey fascist uniform like all boys at the time, a teacher had secretly given him banned texts. ‘Young people are the future; they shouldn’t let themselves be used by the oppressor’, Petter read. It taught him that doing nothing wasn’t a neutral act; it is one’s duty to resist. It had made Petter see the world with different eyes. It was the reason he decided to join the resistance.
Rather than simply obeying rules as was common practice during fascism, the new school teaches students critical thinking, debating and taking responsibility. The teacher is no longer ‘the boss’, but the students’ equal who coaches them and works with them. All students get the same opportunities in the form of lodging, meals, clothes and books, all paid for by the school.
Because of his slender posture and gentle character, Petter is referred to as ‘angelic Renzo’, but his personality is far from fragile. His school is dealing with money issues and lack of space, but Petter and his comrades keep going and find solutions for everything. One thing they do for example, is transfer a former brothel into a school building, and it is young Petter who negotiates with the pastor, the police and local residents.
After the one in Milan, nine other ‘convitti’ are founded. Students complete a ‘standard’ curriculum from primary to secondary school and on top of it receive vocational training tailored to the local economy. Students in Cremona for example are trained to work in the dairy industry; in Genova the focus is on nautical studies and in Sanremo students are trained for the tourism and hospitality sector. For the first time specialised programmes for young people with disabilities are included as well.
‘Communist den’
Between 1945 and 1948, several thousand students attend one of the ten convitti. The schools form the basis for a national plan that stipulates a new educational standard. The objective is to eventually have 90 convitti in Italy, one for each province.
But it never comes to that. In 1947, the government of national unity in which all parties work together to eliminate fascism and build democracy, comes to an end. Under pressure from the US, all socialists and communists are kicked out of the government. When the Christian democrats win the elections in 1948, the ‘unity against fascism’ is officially over. From that moment on, all initiatives that are connected to antifascist resistance are looked upon with suspicion. The new boarding schools are regarded as ‘communist dens’. Subsidies are revoked and one by one they are forced to close.
It must have been hard for Petter to watch his work being destroyed. He feels he needs a break, but for Petter that doesn’t mean resting and doing nothing. With a few comrades he leaves for Poland to help clear rubble in Warsaw and Łódź during summer. The winter he spends alone in Czechoslovakia, where he works in a coal mine. He enjoys the hard physical labour, and life among the workers lifts his spirits.
Back in Italy, he starts studying psychology and eventually becomes a well-known professor. He devotes his scientific research to educational psychology and writes numerous books and articles. He keeps on teaching well into old age. Reflecting back, he concludes that his boarding schools had been years ahead of ‘principles and achievements that would only later, much later, become reality in our country and education’.
