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  • No. 44 – Schools and Styles of Thought in Education

    2025-11-01

    Maîtres à penser and guides to one’s inner life, intellectuals who haven given rise to “schools of thought,” or who, in the name of intellectual freedom, deliberately avoided founding any. Schools or study circles that formed spontaneously, without matters of centers or peripheries. Styles of thought that prevailed due to their crystalline clarity of reasoning, and others that did so through – and for – the “struggle of the concept.” Exemplary figures and styles of thought that distinguished themselves also for their capacity to nurture meaningful relationships, to create original educational spaces, to open up previously unimagined horizons, and to chart unexpected pathways.

    The educational substance of these schools and of reasoning styles is always relational: by making visible, knowable, and meaningful what was previously obscure, new perspectives of inquiry and new ways of interpreting the world emerge. For the learner, it is no longer a matter of simply absorbing what is taught, but rather of cultivating what is worth seeking, through an autonomous action and direction – thanks to what the gaze of the Maître has made tangible. Namely: what makes a master figure are the relationships occurring between forms of knowledge, as much as the intersubjective relations – and yet every Maître possesses their own distinctive and unique traits.

    The history of cultural life, both within and outside of the academia, is scattered with such exemplary instances, each characterized by unique encounters between individuals and knowledge. Marked by inheritances and betrayals, amplifications and reversals, exercised and surrendered power, envy and joy, those encounters continue to proliferate, becoming the living substance for further reflection and cultural generativity – albeit indirectly.

    At the end of his much-praised Lessons of the Masters (it was 2002), George Steiner asked how long this rich pedagogical genealogy could endure in the “age of irreverence,” in which – beyond any moral judgment – it is precisely the strength of the relational bond that has dissipated. Thus, the very survivability of this unique form of educational relationship has been put into serious question. According to Steiner, nothing “can erase the new day we experience when we have understood a master. That joy does not lessen death, but it makes us furious at its waste. Is there no time for one more lesson?” (p. 171).

    Or perhaps, as Adorno wrote in Minima Moralia, to become a style of thought that truly teaches (in-segna) needs the “sensitivity to all that is remote and secluded, hatred of banality, the quest for what has not yet been worn out, for what has not yet been absorbed into the general schema.” For this “is still the last chance of thought. In a spiritual hierarchy that calls everyone to account before it, it is only irresponsibility the one that is able to name the hierarchy for what it is. The sphere of circulation, of which intellectual outsiders are the exponents, offers the last refuge to the spirit that it trades in – at the very moment when, in truth, no refuge exists anymore. Whoever offers a unicum that no one is willing to buy represents, even against their own will, the freedom from exchange” (p. 70).

    This issue of Paideutika is devoted to reflecting on what aspects – if any – of the legacy of the masters, of the “schools of thought,” or of that unique unicum “no one is willing to buy,” are still worth cultivating today from a pedagogical perspective. The themes or the arguments? The styles of thought or their outcomes? The modes of relationship, or the exemplariness of the individual?

    Far from any celebratory temptation, any declaration of heuristic faith, or any servile rhetoric, the question hereby posed is a cultural one – and explicitly anti-rhetorical: does the “lesson of the masters” still make sense today, or is it still possible to engage with it? And under what conditions? What fades or is bound to fade if the Schools of Thought disappear? What must be lost in the relationship with the magister in order to achieve autonomy? What, on the other hand, is essential to preserve and nurture?

    Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

    • Studies of the “schools of thought” that have significantly influenced national or international pedagogical culture, or (conversely) that have been undervalued;
    • Analyses of the “styles of thought” that have left a mark on the current educational landscape, or (conversely) that have gone underappreciated;
    • Comparative and critical-pedagogical analyses of exemplary figures of pedagogical “masters”;
    • Historical and cultural testimonies of communities of thought;
    • Analyses of changes and continuities in teacher-student relationships within Schools of Thought;
    • The rationale and limitations of exemplariness in styles of thought;
    • Critical-pedagogical analyses of the autonomy of thought within Schools.

    Keywords: schools of thought; styles of thought; exemplariness; research autonomy.

    Expected publication date: early December 2026
    Proposal submission deadline: June 10th, 2026
    Notification of acceptance: by July 10th, 2026
    Double-blind peer review outcome (first round): by September 20th, 2026

    Read more about No. 44 – Schools and Styles of Thought in Education

  • No. 43 - Times, Events, Memories. Pedagogical and Historical Trails

    2025-06-04

    From the second half of the twentieth century, historical and pedagogical research, much like other fields within the humanities, has adopted a more diverse and differentiated perspective in analyzing its objects of study. It has embraced the lessons, innovations, and stimuli that have emerged from the new historiographical, social, and cultural approaches, which, in turn, have profoundly transformed the epistemological foundations of research.

    The comparative perspective of the school of the Annales (Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and Fernand Braudel), as well as the Kulturgeschichte tradition of German historiography (which goes from Bernard Groethuysen to the socio-historical approaches of Norbert Elias and to the method of "historical semantics" of Reinhart Koselleck and François Hartog), have provided enduring reasons for overcoming the universalistic vision. Such vision, from Hegel to Dilthey, Troeltsch, and Croce, had shaped the narration of history — including educational history — through phases, events, and protagonists.

    New directions in historical and historical-pedagogical research have also gained traction in Italy, by incorporating the innovations brought about by the interpretive-narrative paradigm proposed by Hayden White in the 1970s and the investigations on the relationship between microhistory and Weltgeschichte proposed by Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi. These approaches, which emphasize the need to give voice to so-called "marginal" events, have consistently been underpinned by strong methodological rigor and they have been rooted in documentary and archival research and in the testing of hypotheses for internal consistency.

    While reaffirming the necessity and importance of historical-pedagogical handbooks — which, when properly structured, have always offered an overarching framework of influences, protagonists, and differing traditions — research has increasingly delved into the analysis of the many and varied interconnections between specific social and cultural events, working itself against the complex backdrop of geopolitical and institutional changes that, over the last seventy years, have not involved Western societies only. The increasing focus of a significant part of historical and pedagogical studies on certain aspects of educational history — from classical Greece to the "collective shipwreck" of modernity, which represent themes that have been thoroughly explored from different perspectives by scholars such as Mario Alighiero Manacorda, Antonio Santoni Rugiu, and Egle Becchi — has enabled the recovery of the features of often-overlooked events, broadening them through a greater sensitivity towards the history of ideas and culture.

    In this sense, as Jacques Le Goff rightly pointed out, the relationship between past and present plays a decisive role in the positioning of the historian. On the one hand, he acts as a privileged reader of archival documents. On the other hand, he works as a weaver of a narrative fabric that, while distanced from mere (though important) chronology, aims to shed light on the complex and problematic relationship between time, events, and society. This relationship does not only concern the past; it challenges the historian directly: their research and verification tools, methodological anchors, and epistemological references.

    As Le Goff wrote: “The historian will make further progress in the understanding of history by striving to challenge himself, just as a scientific observer takes into account the changes he may bring to the object he is observing” (J. Le Goff, History and Memory, Turin, Einaudi, 1977, p. 37). This highlights the continuous activity of clivage (de Certeau), – namely, the distancing and separation — the historian must maintain with regard to the object of their study.

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  • No. 42 - Growing intelligence

    2024-10-05

    What is the proprium of human intelligence?

    In the humanities, the query has always questioned philosophy, psychology and pedagogy, and recursively outlines have emerged based on subjective determinations and environmental influences relating to consciousness, awareness, individual freedom and social responsibility. The transformative interference of AIs poses - at least in part - different issues today. The development of scientific fields of study that have redefined the boundaries and strategies of thought, as well as the relationship between content and elaborative functions, are also calling for a thorough rethinking of the anthropological graft between human and artificial intelligence. It would seem, in fact, that it is no longer a matter of establishing dominant boundaries between human and technological, but of suitably arguing the forms of their intertwining. This does not only presuppose the need to know better and to learn how to use artificial intelligence, but also radically redescribes anthropos, the interactions between human beings, the processes of subjectivation, the status of human understandings and knowledge, thereby also reforming the participatory and emancipatory possibilities of individuals.

    Considering such a heuristic perspective, this issue of Paideutika intends to explore the impact that AI, and particularly the generative one, has or may have on personality formation, on the capacity for critical oversight, on the margins of individual and social self-determination, and on the transformation of knowledge and cognition, thus encouraging pedagogical reflection on the whys even before the hows. In fact, understanding the cultural and economic-social relations that regulate, for example, the areas of the public and the private, of the purposes and strategies of action, as well as analysing the irreducibility of the human in the exercise of the intentionality of consciousness, are the prerequisites for investigating how these technologies can assist, support, alter conceptions of the human and educational practices.

    In conclusion, what intelligence will we, as educators and as intellectuals, be called upon to cultivate?

    The contributions may concern, approximately, the following pathways:

    - intelligence and power: educational and formative implications;

    - intelligence and creativity;

    - pedagogical theories relating to AI technologies;

    - information and knowledge at the time of AI;

    - links between aesthetic education and technology education in the maturation of personality;

    - critical thinking and intellectual conditioning;

    -Instrumental functions and ontological structures of AI technologies;

    - conceptions of knowledge and thinking and their transformations;

    - experiences and research projects concerning the relationships between knowledge, AI and subjectivation;

    - exemplary figures for rethinking interpretative paradigms of thinking, intelligere and knowing;

    - reconnaissance of national and international pedagogical studies on AI, with particular attention to chatbots;

    - transformation of human-machine interactions and their educational-educational implications;

    - intellectual property and autonomous generation: issues concerning the production and acquisition of knowledge, scientific and non-scientific.

    Keywords: human intelligence; artificial intelligence; power and knowledge; education and technologies.

    Read more about No. 42 - Growing intelligence

  • no. 41 - Educational ethics and secondary school

    2024-05-17

    In the wake of the renewed debate around the secondary school, some major questions have been raised once again on the ethical-educational status of this school level for a pedagogical analysis. While it is true that secondary school remains for many the ultimate achievement of education, its (purely? strictly?) pedagogical horizons are not as univocal. Regardless of the course of study, in fact, and its corresponding functional role as an apprenticeship or as an intellectual training, the partition between different social conditions and the inherent social reproduction have ended up making the school itself an economical-political, and only very marginally pedagogical, issue. 

    On the other hand, when the nexus between pedagogical-foundational theorisation and methodological-didactic praxis in the sphere of cultural elaboration is loosened, the vast field of secondary education also runs the risk of losing the ethical-social reasons for educating. Given the fact that secondary school education is not always conceived and acted upon as education for sociability, understanding of the world and self-building, or the enhancement of multifaceted contexts and the understanding of the complex heterogeneity that characterises the lives of preadolescents and adolescents,  it thus ends up coinciding either with instrumental learning or the ethical-pedagogical commitment of each individual teacher.

    Notwithstanding the renewed call to account for the public, institutional and cultural functions of secondary school, and in view of the accelerated social and cultural changes that imbue our time, what education is being called upon to exercise its formative action? Towards which ethical, cultural and citizenship horizons is it headed?

    Furthermore: can the intensification of the public demand for educational intervention on preadolescents and adolescents be read not only as a seismograph of a widespread need, but also as an opportunity for a pedagogical reflection on the status of secondary school? And around which topic areas can the educational responsibility concerning teachers and students be defined?

    Submissions can be related to the following lines of thought:

    - the role of pedagogical epistemology for secondary school;

    - pedagogical ethics in school;

    - educational ethics for preadolescents and adolescents;

    - educational ethics for secondary school teachers;

    - the cultural and political role of education in secondary schools;

    - high-complexity contexts, intercultural practices and ethical-educational perspectives;

    - education to responsibility of adolescents in school and out of school;

    - personality formation of adolescents in and out of school;

    - critical analysis of the socio-cultural changes that have affected and are still affecting the education-schooling relationship;

    - historical-pedagogical, literary, social samples of educational commitment in or for secondary school;

    - models of first-grade secondary school;

    - comparative analyses of Italian and foreign secondary schools;

    - adolescence and youth: ethical-pedagogical transitions.

     

    Keywords: secondary school; pedagogical ethics; educational responsibility; pre-adolescence; adolescence.

     

    Publication: beginning of May 2025
    Submissions deadline: December 10th 2024
    Journal approval: within January 10th 2025
    First peer review’s outcome: within February 20th 2025

    Read more about no. 41 - Educational ethics and secondary school

  • No. 40 - Formative cultures of the edge

    2023-06-11

    As the past century has unequivocally shown (and the current one seems to have dramatically inherited), exile constitutes one of the prevailing forms of dispossession of individual rights. In the tragic nature of this condition of estrangement, it is precisely the 20th century - between apocalyptic disasters and periods of great cultural turmoil - that provides us with a highly significant educational panorama, which, somewhat paradoxically, seems to rest precisely on the rubble of that despoliation, thus giving rise to a significant duality. 

    The dual position of tragicity/generativity has made intellectual exile formatively relevant, even in its indirect manifestations, such as the individual's desire not to belong to any institution, in the pursuit of the opposition between insider and outsider.

    For the experiences detected in every scientific and cultural sphere, referring to personalities who, despite having chosen silent 'marginality', have provided a contribution, often crucial, to substantial heuristic changes, it is possible to speak of a forced or voluntary estrangement, of an escape devoted to necessity or guaranteed by significant economic means and international cultural recognition. And yet, often and in not a few situations, it is necessary to highlight not only the autonomous transitivity of such a choice, but the decisive importance of paradigm and style shifts.

     

    A more careful reflection on these figures suggests defining how much and in what way this "intellectual exile" - whether in its form of forced removal or in the voluntary choice to remain on the margins of cultural and educational institutions - has influenced and, more often than not, enriched and upset the cultural representation of the intellectual, between denied commitment and refusal of any nicodemism or "voluntary servitude".

    In this broad perspective, it is not only a physical exile but also a 'mental' one; not only 'forced' but also shaped by the ability of these multiform intelligences to be able to adapt to a new environment and to influence it, sometimes 'inventing' new cultural realities and new educational experiences.

    Although it may seem contradictory, it is possible to argue that an intellectual exile is highly active in terms of creativity and generativity. This attitude has crossed all forms of human manifestation, in the most unimaginable situations of difficulty: from literature to music, from philosophy to pedagogy up to psychoanalysis and the natural sciences.

     

    But how, then, can we say - in its formative, educational and pedagogical dimension - the importance and permanence of this enormous cultural heritage?

    Firstly, by starting from the language (through the experience of a real 'uprooting') and, secondly, from the intellectual obstinacy of some exemplars of this extraordinary collective representation to want to follow secondary paths little travelled by the official culture.

    The gap experienced by those who work in the scientific and cultural spheres between an inside and an outside of institutional dynamics, between the possibility, that is, of playing a plurivocal role through the respectful executability (and exigibility) of the procedural apparatus and the critical disposition to the imponderable transvaluation of one's own time, elicits certain questions that underlie this proposal. What, in fact, does this stubborn temptation to remain on the formative edge of the institution involve? What change, individual and collective, occurs through the persistent opposition to the institutional obstinacy of wanting to reduce all 'knowledge' to its own discursive rules?

     

    Keywords: intellectual exile; generative tragicity; insider/outsider; cultural marginality.

     

    Publication: beginning of December 2024
    Submissions deadline: June 10th 2024
    Journal approval: within July 10th 2024
    First peer review’s outcome: within September 20th 2024

    Read more about No. 40 - Formative cultures of the edge

  • No. 39 - Becoming ourselves

    2023-04-26

    As a tribute to Fulvio Papi, a strict scholar of Antonio Banfi, a philosopher who was always attentive to the educational aspects of the relationship between life and culture and a long-standing contributor to Paideutika, the Editorial Board dedicates this issue to the theme "Becoming ourselves".

    In one of his last works, La sapienza moderna (Ibis, 2020), Papi collected fragments of philosophers and writers followed by brief reflections, in a methodological attempt to show how 'modern wisdom' cannot be anything other than the posing of a question to the reader. No answers, then, and no meddling, but the 'obstinate' pursuit - to use a term dear to him - of questioning.

    The extract chosen here, whose title is re-proposed as the subject of the call and whose protagonist is also Marguerite Yourcenar, can be fruitfully addressed as an educational and formative issue, generating studies and considerations on the ages of life ranging from adolescence to ageing, on the symbols and signs that underpin them, on the meanings of the experiences that characterise them, on memories and their relationship with the thought of the end. But the structure of Papi's reasoning also suggests, so to speak, 'methodological' indications on what is the relationship between the subject in the making and its 'fundamental sources', on the function of reading as a gesture that calls into question one's subjective responsibility and awareness, on the interiority that feeds itself, despite itself or intentionally, on the living materiality of knowledge.

    The breadth of the possibilities of analysis thus seemed to us the best way to enhance the richness of Papi's proposal in the time to come.

     

    "'As adolescents, when the possibilities all at once urge us on, making us only regret having to choose, these characters from the past, these possibilities that have materialised, appear to us, I dare say, as guideposts along the roads we will or will not take. In them we do not worship symbols, but signs. Then, as life has both developed us and stripped us - developed in the photographic sense of the word, stripped in the wine sense, stripped of all that is other than ourselves, developed in all that we are given to be - when we begin to know, even to a rough approximation, how we will react to pleasure, and pain, and truths, we grow weary of ourselves. Why is it that we are not given to wasting more than one life? By dint of knowing the exact number of our gold teeth, the amount of our annuities, if we have any, and the name of those diseases that can lead us to death, by dint of wandering, like a tourist travelling out of boredom, in this well-categorised museum that is ourselves, we end up feeling uncomfortable in these places of motionless enchantments, galleries, ruins, libraries, icy waters, mirrors à la Mallarmé, springs where, slowly, Narcissus petrified himself. And we only love the living, because they, at least, give us the illusion of change'.

    (Marguerite Yourcenar, Pellegrina e straniera (1989), it. tr. Elena Giovannelli, Turin, Einaudi, 1990).

     

    The worst, I think, when the measure of time begins to arouse curiosity and respect, at least among our few remaining friends, is to be crouched in one's own corner while thousands of images flow by as if in our sight, and each of them has its own little theatre around it to remind us that we too had our part in it, always enthusiastic even in the eventual sadness. One knows that even to reread a poem is to slip into apparitions of a time that are now like mute shadows. And one also knows that others will never read those poems of which they may know the name of their author'”.

    Fulvio Papi, La sapienza moderna, Como-Pavia, Ibis, 2022, pp. 46-47.

     

    Keywords: memory, interiority, reading, autobiography, personality shaping.

     

    Publication: beginning of May 2024
    Submissions deadline: December 10th 2023
    Journal approval: within January 10th 2024
    First peer review’s outcome: within February 20th 2024

    Read more about No. 39 - Becoming ourselves

  • Education and the screens

    2022-07-21

    Starting with the cinema and up to our current audiovisual system, moving images have been part of certain constructions of meaning that arose in a certain time and place.

    It is certain that, amidst ideological confirmations and disconcerting disclosures, the spectacular dimension has contributed to shaping the collective imagination through the dissemination of models, counter-models, icons and stereotypes, to the point of becoming, today, an almost inescapable element of our ordinary perceptive experience. It is certain that representation, as such, chooses to take, combine and show certain elements of lived life; and it is precisely in the implicit or explicit meanings of this “manipulative act” that, in the case of the cinema, for example, Francesco Casetti identified the socio-historical proof brought by the “Eye of the Century”.

    The spectacle that has lived and lives on our screens, therefore, corresponds to a “signifying practice” that, while proposing a fictitious world, can suggest much about the material and spiritual experience concretely lived by individuals in a given epoch. This is why audiovisual products are rightfully included among the actual sources of social-historical studies, as W. J. T. Mitchell specified when speaking of the visual or pictorial turn, i. e. the growing interest in “the visual construction of the social field” and “the social construction of the visual field”.

    Within this framework, how are the subjects and places of education shown? What aspects emerge and which are concealed? What can they suggest about the social relations concretely experienced within the educational sphere?

    Such, then, are the pedagogical questions that animate the question.

     

    Keywords: culture industry; education; entertainment; youth; ideology.

     

    Publication: beginning of December 2023
    Submissions deadline: June 10th 2023
    Journal approval: within July 10th 2023
    First peer review’s outcome: within September 20th 2023

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  • N. 37 - Mythographies of education

    2022-05-06

    Myth is generally considered a fantastic narrative that, in its transmissibility, proposes a multiplicity of interpretations of the event, always referring - this is one of its characteristics - to elements that are constantly repeated.

    Far from considering myth as a predominantly 'negative' discourse ('myth rests in itself', as Karoly Kerényi used to repeat), there is a temporal permanence of some focal points which, in their explicit or implicit dialectics, generate a constellation of interpretations, often left to the 'fashions of the time'.

    There are, therefore, different 'mythologies' that have created symbolic imaginations that, in turn, have been stratified in what was once called the 'collective imaginary', and that provide an almost static reception of the “cultural objects' with which one deals in everyday life. In this case, the boundary between myth and ideology becomes so blurred that the stratification of meaning of interpretation seems to become impregnable, while the very experience of what remains (the mythical figure in its representative multiplicity, precisely) goes through the symbolic transformation of social meanings.

    Why the 'myth' in education, or rather the identification of certain mythographies on which education has fed and continues to feed?

    Because there is, on the one hand, a permanence of mythographic structures in education, through the constant repetition over time of themes and topics. On the other hand, education lives on (and through) its myths and the mythologies of its "schools", its discourses and its protagonists, which becomes (also) the reproposition of a past often in clear contrast with the reality of things.

     

    Key words: repetition, permanence, imagination, cultural object, ideology

     

    Publication: beginning of May 2023
    Submissions deadline: December 10th 2022
    Journal approval: within January 10th 2023
    First peer review’s outcome: within February 20th 2023

    Read more about N. 37 - Mythographies of education

  • N. 36 - Pedagogical transformations in contemporary world. Perspectives of Philosophy of Education in Italy (2)

    2022-05-05

    Starting from many strengthened legacies or from the latest interpretations, however capable of connecting national and international perspectives, the Philosophies of Education in Italy describe a cultural scenario which is heterogeneous as for its approaches and horizons. Nowadays, this interpretive wealth is required to identify the real or presumed transformations, to be put into action or to hold out against, that characterize contemporary time.

    “Paideutika” dedicates also the second year's issue to the Italian philosophical-educative panorama and to the priorities that the different approaches recognize as needful in a planning perspective, thus trying to create a minimum inquiry map for the upcoming times. 

    For this reason, this issue will collect some short contributions (max 25,000 characters), only in English, to promote an international visibility, that can suggest a research horizon.

     

    Eds: Elena Madrussan, Mino Conte

    Publication: beginning of December 2022
    Submissions deadline: June 10th 2021
    Journal approval: within July 10th 2022
    First peer review’s outcome: within September 20th 2022

    Read more about N. 36 - Pedagogical transformations in contemporary world. Perspectives of Philosophy of Education in Italy (2)

  • N. 35 – Pedagogical transformations in contemporary world. Perspectives of Philosophy of Education in Italy

    2021-09-25

    Starting from many strengthened legacies or from the latest interpretations, however capable of connecting national and international perspectives, the Philosophies of Education in Italy describe a cultural scenario which is heterogeneous as for its approaches and horizons. Nowadays, this interpretive wealth is required to identify the real or presumed transformations, to be put into action or to hold out against, that characterize contemporary time.

    “Paideutika” dedicates this issue to the Italian philosophical-educative panorama and to the priorities that the different approaches recognize as needful in a planning perspective, thus trying to create a minimum inquiry map for the upcoming times. 

    For this reason, this issue will collect some short contributions (max 25,000 characters), only in English, to promote an international visibility, that can suggest a research horizon.

     

    Eds: Elena Madrussan, Mino Conte

    Publication: beginning of May 2022
    Submissions deadline: December 10th 2021
    Journal approval: within January 10th 2022
    First peer review’s outcome: within February 20th 2022

    Read more about N. 35 – Pedagogical transformations in contemporary world. Perspectives of Philosophy of Education in Italy