Gramsci, education and power

Abstract

Antonio Gramsci (born in Ales, Sardinia, 1891; died in Rome, 1937) is widely regarded as one of the foremost social and political theorists of the twentieth century. Raised in Sardinia, he subsequently moved to Turin to take up a scholarship at the University of Turin. The city was a hotbed of political mobilisation and was part of the industrial heartland of the Italian North. Despite his great promise as a philologist, having been heralded by one of his teachers, Matteo Bartoli, as ‘the archangel’ set to ‘defeat the grammarians’,(Gramsci, 1973, 80), 1 Gramsci never completed his studies. He dropped out of university to engage in revolutionary socialist politics being prominent in workers’ education circles and in socialist journalism, among other things. He eventually emerged as one of the most prominent figures in the radical left of the Italian Socialist Party and later the first Secretary General of the Italian Communist Party, following the split which occurred in Leghorn (Livorno) in 1921. Arrested in 1926 following the Fascist rise to power, he would spend the rest of his life in prison. According to the chief prosecutor, his brain was meant to be ‘stopped from functioning’ for 20 years (Hoare and Nowell Smith, in Gramsci, 1971, p. lxxxix) in a ruthless, clinical process publically described by Enrico Berlinguer, fellow Sardinian and successor as PCI Secretary General, as intended to ‘assassinate’ the Communist leader ‘scientifically’ 2 . This comment by the Prosecutor proved to be wide off the mark. In actual fact, Gramsci’s ten years of imprisonment enabled him to bequeath to posterity one of the most prominent compilations of notes in twentieth century political thought. Some taking the form of essays, these notes would have a great influence on a variety of fields including Political Science, Anthropology, Philosophy, Sociology, Literary Theory, Education Studies, History and Cultural Studies. Education, in its broadest sense, featured prominently in Gramsci’s thinking. He himself was an indefatigable organiser of education courses even when awaiting trial on the island of Ustica, an open ‘island prison’ at the time. Gramsci and other political detainees would mingle with the locals and even invite them to attend the school they set up there – a landmark in the development of education on the island. Gramsci wrote not only about the Unitarian school but also about different routes to education, such as non-formal education routes – altre vie (other routes) – including the short-lived Institute of Proletarian Culture and a ‘correspondence school’ for the newly set up Italian Communist Party.