The Reform of Education

The Reform of Education is a work by Giovanni Gentile. The title page names Dino Bigongiari as the authorized translator and Benedetto Croce as the writer of an introduction. The contents list names, among others, chapters titled Education and Nationality, Education and Personality and The Fundamental Antinomy of Education.

The note says that shortly after Trieste fell into Italian hands, a series of lectures was arranged for the school teachers of the city, and that Giovanni Gentile, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Rome, was assigned to open the series. The text asks, among other questions, whether common territory, common language, political life led in common, or the accumulation of memories, of traditions, and of customs constitutes nationality. The text calls the idea of motion without a mass, baffling as it is to our imagination, perhaps the most effective warning that can be given to those who wish to fix in their minds the exact concept of the nature of the spirit. The text says nothing is more impious than the history of religion, in which man progresses from station to station along the unending way of sorrows and joys.