Mario Alighiero Manacorda and Marxist pedagogy in post-World War II Italy. About a recent volume

Abstract

On the basis of a recent volume by Luca Silvestri, Una vita onnilaterale: la riflessione pedagogica di Mario Alighiero Manacorda (1914-2013), Unicopli, Milano 2024, the paper aims to retrace the biographical, intellectual and political history of Mario Alighiero Manacorda. In addition, the paper seeks to highlight the significance of the irruption of Manacorda’s Marxist pedagogy based on philological and critical studies of the works of Marx, Engels and Gramsci into the school and educational landscape of post-World War II Italy, which is not divorced from a project of transformation in a democratic and egalitarian sense of social reality and an alternative to the theoretical and ideological models then dominant.