Carmel Borg, former dean of the Faculty of Education, and Mario Cardona, have just published a book in Maltese entitled Don Lorenzo Milani, L-Edukazzjoni u l-Ġustizzja Soċjali ("Don Lorenzo Milani, Education and Social Justice").

The book, published by Media Centre Limited, foregrounds the educational legacy of the controversial Tuscan priest, Don Lorenzo Milani (1923-1967), and the eight students from the school of Barbiana, a remote hamlet in the Mugello region of Tuscany.

The students, under the supervision of Lorenzo Milani, wrote a number of short, reflective pieces on their plight as students in mainstream schools.

These reflections, backed by empirical evidence, were eventually collected in a book - Lettera ad una professoressa (Letter to a Teacher) - published in 1967. The book became an indictment of the way thousands of students had been pushed out of mainstream Italian schools.

In the words of Nevio Santini, one of the students of Don Lorenzo Milani, Dr Borg's and Mr Cardona's book reveals the moral atrophies of many educational systems that fail to translate the discourse of equal opportunities into policies, curricula and pedagogies that generate equal outcomes.

The book also captures the struggles and possibilities for new educational visions.