Equality in education

Don Lorenzo Milani (1923 -1967) was a controversial Tuscan priest in Barbiana, a remote hamlet in the Mugello region of Tuscany.

In 1967, a book was published containing the reflections of eight Barbiana school students supervised by Don Lorenzo regarding their plight in mainstream schools, backed by empirical evidence. The book, entitled Lettera a una professoressa, became an indictment of the way mainstream Italian schools had pushed out thousands of students. Don Lorenzo's educational legacy is the foreground of a new book entitled 'Don Lorenzo Milani, L-Edukazzjoni u l-Ġustizzja Soċjali by former Faculty of Education dean Carmel Borg and Mario Cardona, published in Maltese by the Media Centre.

In the words of Nevio Santini, one of Don Lorenzo's students, the book reveals the moral atrophies of many educational systems that fail to translate the discourse of equal opportunities into policies, curricula and paedagogies that generate equal outcomes. It also captures the struggles and possibilities for new educational visions.