Lorenzo Milani in our times

Abstract

This article pays tribute to one of Europe's foremost critical pedagogues, the Tuscan Don Lorenzo Milani, on the ninetieth anniversary of his birth. It highlights the key moments in his life as priest and educator as well as his pedagogical approach directed at challenging the class-conditioned status quo in Italian society and at achieving greater social justice. His was a pedagogy which highlighted the collective dimensions of learning and teaching, pupils being students and educators at the same time, an approach to learning akin to what Paulo Freire would call critical literacy and what contemporary writers would call critical media literacy in the sense of reading and writing the word and the world. His pedagogy entailed a process of reading history against the grain as part of an attempt to generate a culture of non-militarization. All these elements make Don Milani and his student-teachers pedagogues for our times.