Scuola-Città Pestalozzi: un viaggio nella Didattica Attiva e nell’educazione democratica lungo 80 anni

Abstract

This article reconstructs the pedagogical and institutional history of Scuola-Città Pestalozzi eighty years after its founding, tracing its evolution as a laboratory of active pedagogy and democratic education within the landscape of Italian schooling. Established in 1945, the school’s project took shape in the cultural climate of the immediate postwar period, in open critique of the transmissive, selective, and authoritarian model inherited from the Gentile tradition. The contribution highlights the theoretical matrices underpinning the experience—from John Dewey to Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi—and examines the principal pedagogical nuclei that have characterized the school: student self-government; the centrality of the working community; learning through experience; affective and relational education; educational continuity; the valorization of manual work; and democratic participation. The article shows how Scuola-Città Pestalozzi progressively transformed its original model, moving through the seasons of pedagogical activism, cognitivism, and experimentation with vertical continuity between primary and lower secondary education. The analysis underscores how numerous innovations now widespread in Italian schools—ranging from full-day schooling to collegial governing bodies, from laboratory-based teaching to formative assessment—were anticipated and trialed in the Florentine school. In conclusion, the article interprets the Scuola-Città Pestalozzi experience not as a mere historical exception but as a still-relevant paradigm of democratic schooling, capable of integrating participation, inclusion, social responsibility, and the critical formation of the person.