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Federico Batini, Peter Mayo, Alessio Surian: Lorenzo Milani, The School of Barbiana and the Struggle for Social Justice. Peter Lang, 2014. 122 pp.

The authors of this book on Lorenzo Milani have done two excellent jobs: they not only went back in time to tell in a well-documented way who Milani was, but they did it in such a vivid way that it transpires how Milani is speaking much of our concerns today.

For many of us, Milani is there on our shelves and we hardly notice that his major concerns that made him who he was are still ours, at least many of them.

Milani, a priest and educator, was out of place in his time. He would have been more in place and happy, had he known the days of Pope Francis.

Well ahead of Pope Francis, Milani espoused a pedagogy and a Church reaching out to geographical and existential peripheries. This alone makes of him a prophetic voice.

I do not claim any particular expertise in this field. But reading Federico Batini’s, Peter Mayo’s and Alessio Surian’s publication, Lorenzo Milani, the School of Barbiana and the Struggle for Social Justice, makes me feel and think that Milani’s project was not mainly or exclusively about education.

It was more about the society we all long to belong to, a society we all dream to be part of and which creates more harmony with who we are.

As the authors claim, in his Letter to a Teacher, Milani “captures some of the basic features of a socially differentiating education within a Western democracy as well as providing insights for a truly transformative and possibly revolutionary pedagogy geared toward the kind of outcomes one would expect any citizen to achieve”.

This reminds me of Augustine speaking of the role of the Inner Teacher. In his work The Teacher, Augustine does not provide a pedagogical manifesto.

Rather, one finds there a presentation of the use of dialogue as a practice of teaching in which the learner’s experience becomes a means for understanding.

Education for Milani is neither the means nor the end. It is simply the ongoing process. And rightly so, because nobody educates anybody. People educate each other. When asked to lay out programmes, subjects and educational techniques, Milani simply declared that the question was wrongly posed.

“They shouldn’t ask about what to do in order to teach but about how one needs to be in order to teach.”

His pedagogy centred on the development of the person, on determination, independence, and will power.

The motivation and desire for autonomy and development were fundamental for him alongside the pedagogy of mistakes.

For whoever read Milani, as well as for those who never read him, the task of the three authors is highly commendable.

Their work is very well documented, highly knowledgeable and succinct.

It provides a very good taste of the times he lived in, where both society and Church are concerned and it brings out how incredibly still relevant his concerns remain today, especially in the task and challenges ahead which education is meant to meet.

Their work is well documented, highly knowledgeable and succinct

Reading this book made me understand Milani as the personification of a rare virtue: parrhesia. St Paul speaks of parrhesia as the virtue of boldness, demanded of Christians to stand up and be counted. Michel Foucault translates parrhesia as fearless speech.

“It is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognises truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people.” This, I consider a snapshot of Milani.

Milani’s educational project as succinctly presented in this book, was meant primarily to counter the silence of slavery which in his time was still being an imposition to favour the status quo of a society which was unjust and made of unequals, particularly where education was concerned.

Milani opted to break with the mainstream educational system, as well as with the culture and the church of his time.

He sought mainly to make those imposing the silence of slavery, be it society or the Church, feel ashamed.

The establishment was very uncomfortable with Milani in spite of the fact that his uphill struggle needs to be seen in its immediate historical context which was one of turmoil for both society and the Church.

One cannot overlook at the time the civil rights movement, the Cold War, the attempts at dialogue between Christianity and Marxism, and the breadth of fresh air brought about by Pope John XXIII.

Those were the times paving the way for the Second Vatican Council, giving birth of the theology of liberation in the Latin American Church.

Those were the times which made of liberation a basic category of education, of theology, and of our very understanding of what human dignity is about.

In this volume of merely 122 pages, the authors bring all this together as the boiling scenario in which Milani the priest was ahead of so many others yet in sync with what was about to be born.

The turmoil characterising his society and his Church highlights the foresight of this priest and educator and the depth of his project.

Milani, today as in his lifetime, is a constant accusing finger pointing towards all those who, knowing or not knowing, have betrayed their role in education.

Milani struggled against an educational system that was stifling rather than educative.

He was someone who knew what obedience was and paid a price for his faithfulness, yet who was bold enough to affirm that there are instances where “obedience is no longer a virtue!”

The struggle for social justice is never dated. The social and political context of Milani seems ages past.

Yet, the struggle for social justice, so pivotal in his pedagogy, still figures as crucial in times when we are very easily made to believe that as for the ordering of society we’ve come to the end of history. Milani and his writings were prophetic.

The unending debates on the nature of education prove only one point: that with the passing of time and in spite of epochal changes in society and culture, education is still in search of some of the sure points of reference established by Milani.

At every turning point in history there have always been prophets who boldly and at a cost took the side of those on the margins of society. These are the peaceful destabilisers and the uncomfortable voices that serve as eye-openers.

Milani was one of them and the authors of this book have the credit of delineating impeccably not only how he was a provocation in his time through his critical pedagogy, but also in demonstrating how, half a century after his death, he still provokes.

Milani belongs to the critical pedagogy literature, a genre of pedagogy so missing yet unfortunately not that much missed. Education for him was a form of struggle. It is in the nature of education to enhance wholeness.

But the system Milani was fighting and the system we still many a time uphold is education de-natured.

Milani was a cry in the wilderness to promote autonomy and critical thinking when education was a tool in the hands of those who struggled to keep the status quo.

He was fighting the Empire which had a strong grip on society and Church alike.

It is actually difficult to grasp his vision and foresight if we fail to integrate his educational project with his desire for social justice.

One can only grasp the major concerns of Milani when one considers seriously the discriminatory nature of the power structure in Italian society and how that was also in turn reflected in the state of the Church to which Milani belonged.

As he himself writes in Esperienze Pastorali, “rather than bridging the gap of ignorance, we are interested in bridging the gap of difference” .

These words speak loudly on who Milani was and on how visionary he was in education.