Present as History and the Meridionalist Canon in the Work of Goffredo Fofi

Abstract

The article offers a first assessment of Goffredo Fofi’s (1937–2025) legacy in relation to the field of the history of education, with particular attention to the Meridionalist dimension of his work. Fofi grasped the historical consistency of a plural tradition of democratic civic pedagogy by identifying shared methodological assumptions. By drawing on his own biography as a resource, marked by encounters with authoritative witnesses of the twentieth century, he constructed a genealogy of educational and social intervention and put the lessons of his mentors to use within an original pragmatics of cultural work.