Agricultural education and illiteracy in post-unification Italy

Within the broader picture of the history of education during Italy's Liberal era, the theme of agricultural education has been given a certain amount of attention at the secondary and university level (Bevilacqua Reference Bevilacqua1989; Zaninelli Reference Zaninelli1990; Biagioli and Pazzagli Reference Biagioli and Pazzagli2004; Pazzagli Reference Pazzagli2008) but at the primary level does not yet seem to have been adequately explored. The relative neglect of this topic in the historiography relates to a range of factors, starting with the meagre interest that the Liberal ruling classes showed, at least until the late 1870s, in what they saw as a peripheral aspect of primary education.Footnote ¹ This attitude had a negative impact on both the nature and quantity of the documentation, which was very unsystematic and fragmented, and therefore, indirectly, on consideration of the topic by historians (Soldani Reference Soldani, Bidolli and Soldani2001). In addition, the theme of agricultural education in primary schools has proved more attractive to historians of educational science than to scholars in the history of agriculture, and in consequence has remained largely separate from the various other studies in this field.

To properly understand the sphere of agricultural education in primary schools, we need to examine all the interactive elements that contributed to the educational process, including not only its end users – pupils in primary schools – but also its suppliers: primary school teachers.Footnote ² The system that was intended to give primary school pupils agricultural knowledge principally consisted of three closely connected educational strata: in the first, agricultural education would be delivered by the regular teaching staff in teacher training institutions to their students; in the second, classes in agriculture, generally arranged by other bodies, would be given by lecturers or experts to teachers already in post; and the third involved the teaching given by some primary school teachers to their pupils.

Within these arrangements, the primary school teacher seems to have been a key figure meriting investment if agricultural education was to be developed. During the first 20 years after Italy's unification, however, the country's ruling classes appear not to have been sufficiently interested in investing in primary education (Pruneri Reference Pruneri, De Giorgi, Gaudio and Pruneri2019a). The basic legal arrangements for Italian state education during the Liberal era had been established by the ‘Casati Law’.Footnote ³ Paolo Russo, amongst others, has drawn attention to its priorities:

This emphasis appears to have been partially at odds with Casati's supposed intention to widen the spread of a popular education system that could combat the plague of illiteracy (De Fort Reference De Fort1995, Reference De Fort1996); this objective included provision for the improvement of primary education in the countryside, given that the ‘rural’ school clearly seemed to be the most appropriate focus for the attempt to make the peasant classes literate.Footnote ⁴

Illiteracy constituted a formidable obstacle to the dissemination of agricultural education. Even some shrewd commentators of the period highlighted the importance of basic education as an essential requirement for the spread of agricultural knowhow (Fanti Reference Fanti1883). A major limiting factor in this regard was the quality of primary school teaching, which was in turn affected by the levels of teacher remuneration.

In the context of the complex picture of national policies on primary education that were pursued in the second half of the nineteenth century (Scotto di Luzio Reference Scotto di Luzio2007), and the parallel process of the struggle to disseminate agricultural expertise (Landi Reference Landi and Zaninelli1990), the issue of conveying principles of agriculture to primary school pupils in fact long remained a matter of minimal interest to Italy's ruling classes (Banti Reference Banti, Biagioli and Pazzagli2004). At the start of the 1880s, however, economic, social and political changes provided the conditions for fostering agricultural awareness in primary schools, although this phase only lasted for the length of the decade: it opened with the crisis in agriculture and coincided with the spread in Italy of a positivist approach to education, whose success had major implications for the way that the discipline was organised; it then came to an end with a gradual change in the cultural climate and legislative reforms that steered primary schooling towards a less experimental period.Footnote ⁵

In the late 1870s and early 1880s, partly as a consequence of the ineffectual attempt by the Coppino reform to bolster primary education by raising the duration of compulsory schooling to three years and introducing penalties for non-attendance, the policies of the Ministry for Public Education were influenced by a positivist ‘educational revolution’ (Meda Reference Meda2019) that had been spreading at the European level.Footnote ⁶ In this new approach, the methods of induction and experimentation employed in the fields of physical and natural sciences were extended to the sphere of social sciences. This provided the inspiration for the reform of the scuole normali – the training institutes for schoolteachers – presented in 1880 by Francesco De Sanctis, the minister at the time: the observation of pupils’ responses was to be made central to the teaching of educational science, while practical training was to be allotted more importance (De Fort Reference De Fort1996, 146–147).

In reality, the main obstacles to the delivery of agricultural teaching to the rural classes were the dramatic delay in the acquisition of literacy by the peasant masses and the inadequacy of state funding. In this context, it was argued that effective action by primary school teachers could make an important contribution to the transmission of the basic ideas of agricultural science to the next generation of farmers. Nicola Miraglia, the Director of Agriculture within the Ministry for Agriculture, Industry and Commerce (MAIC), voiced this view in a speech to the eleventh Italian Pedagogical Congress in Rome in 1880, in which he described this key element of the much-discussed process of disseminating agricultural knowledge in Italy:

Agricultural teaching and teachers in the Romagna

By the time that Miraglia was expressing these important considerations, the idea of inserting agricultural principles in primary school teaching programmes had already found its partial realisation in various areas of Italy. This can be deduced, for example, from the reported increase in the number of ‘schools’ in which this teaching was delivered, which rose to 979 in the school year of 1880–1 from 474 in the previous year (see Table 1).Footnote ⁷

Table 1. Distribution of ‘schools’ delivering agricultural teaching at primary school level: numbers by Italian region or regional area, highlighting provinces in each region with the highest number, 1879–80 and 1880–1.

Source: MAIC, Annali di agricoltura, 1881 (1882, 73–74, selected data)

Emilia-Romagna made an important contribution to the numerical increase in these ‘schools’: in one school year, 1880–1, they jumped from 16 in the region to 58. Within Emilia-Romagna, the province of Forlì (which at that point included the Forlì, Cesena and Rimini districts) had the highest number of classrooms in which agricultural teaching was delivered, although it was overtaken by the province of Modena the following year. Forlì's brief supremacy seems to somewhat contradict the figures relating to trends in illiteracy at the provincial level. From Italian unification right up until 1901, this province continued to have the highest illiteracy rate in the region: in 1861 it was recorded as 86.8%, as against a regional average of 81.2% and a national average of 78.8%; 40 years later, the figure had fallen to 59.0%, but the regional and national averages were now 46.3% and 48.5% respectively (Bergonzini Reference Bergonzini1966). This enduring negative primacy can be related to the unfavourable inter-relationship between institutional factors, economic conditions and physical geography that made the province a special case within northern Italy (Preti Reference Preti, Plazzi and Varni1993; Fornasari Reference Fornasari and Amadei2014). A significant part was played by the limited number of municipalities in which the compulsory nature of primary education could be effectively enforced thanks to an adequate supply of teachers, a problem that was especially acute in the extensive Apennine area. Of similar importance was the number of children who could legally be excused from compulsory schooling because they lived in isolated houses more than two kilometres from a school: a fifth of the Romagna's school-age population could not in fact gain access to compulsory primary education because they simply lived too far away. Non-attendance for compulsory schooling was also linked to important economic factors relating to the organisation of employment, which varied between urban and rural settings. In towns and cities, school-age children were pushed towards choosing a trade; in the countryside, the school attendance of peasant children meant that the family lost a supplementary source of income from their deployment in the fields (Pivato Reference Pivato1982; Carboni, Fornasari and Mazzotti Reference Carboni, Fornasari, Mazzotti, Fornasari and Mazzotti2018, 56–60).

The spread of educational positivism led to the formulation of new guidelines; these were absorbed by the primary school teachers in the performance of their routine teaching activity (De Fort Reference De Fort1995, 113–197) and indirectly influenced agricultural education, which was seen as an important area for testing the validity of inductive and experimental methods.

The teaching of agricultural science enabled young people to grasp the rudiments of agronomy, and could at the same time counter the traditional prejudices and age-old beliefs that were widely held within their families. It is therefore hardly surprising that teachers were regarded with mistrust by the heads of rural families; on the one hand, they seemed to be undermining their authority in the children's orientation towards work in the fields, and, on the other, they were putting forward ‘scientific’ agricultural practices that challenged the customs that had emerged from experience and had been handed down over generations (Gregorini Reference Gregorini and Taccolini2004; Fumi Reference Fumi, Cenedella and Fumi2015; Ferrari, Fumi and Morandi Reference Ferrari, Fumi, Morandi, Ferrari, Fumi and Morandi2016). Over time, this mistrust was overcome, at least in part, by action taken by the comizi agrari (local agricultural boards), which managed to create opportunities for the dissemination of agricultural knowhow using practical demonstrations, conferences, training courses and shows, albeit with variable success.Footnote ⁸ Moreover, from the early 1880s onwards, the professional image of the primary school teacher, from being of scant or modest social importance, became more ‘magisterial’. This improvement in the teachers’ reputation, social standing and sense of their own class identity was not without its setbacks: on the eve of the twentieth century, a national enquiry found that only one primary school teacher in three could provide evidence that they had been properly trained, and that it was rare for the best teachers to pursue their profession in rural schools (Chiosso Reference Chiosso2007).

Development of the scuole normali in the Liberal era has been the object of some substantial research (Covato Reference Covato, Covato and Sorge1994). The Scialoja enquiry of 1872 into male and female secondary education had made it clear that a new approach was needed to these institutes and the delivery of teacher training (Montevecchi and Raicich Reference Montevecchi and Raicich1995): there was a need to challenge the notion that this sector had a less important role than either the licei (grammar schools) or the institutes for technical education. The perception had prevailed that primary school teacher training was a sort of post-primary course that often served as ‘a repository for students who were abandoning their studies in other types of school and taking refuge in the scuola normale as a makeshift solution’ (Chiosso Reference Chiosso2007, 91). Recognition of the need for reform was complemented by an increase in the number of scuole normali in the early 1880s, boosted by the Coppino law's introduction of compulsory school attendance at the lower level of primary education. This legislation reflected the commitment of the Sinistra storica, the new left-wing governing coalition, to strengthening the population's basic education, and was one of the distinctive features of its political programme (Sorge Reference Sorge, Covato and Sorge1994).

The increased provision of agricultural education in primary schools had its place within a larger process of public investment in agricultural training at several levels; this had started to take shape right at the start of the 1880s, stimulated not least by the effects of the crisis in agriculture (Cafaro Reference Cafaro and Zaninelli1993; Fumian Reference Fumian1996).Footnote ⁹ The investment was subsequently directed towards benefitting the many young people who had left primary school, in particular by means of the proliferation of ‘scuole pratiche e speciali di agricoltura’ (practical schools and specialist schools in agriculture), and to the progressive detriment of the primary schools themselves.Footnote ¹⁰

Progress in primary education and teacher training was, however, only one of the conditions necessary for the dissemination of agricultural knowledge in primary school classes. For this to be adequate, the teachers themselves also needed to acquire a modest understanding of some essential agricultural principles, and the legislation on education needed to make the teaching of these principles compulsory. In this regard, an earlier provision, based on a formal agreement between the MAIC and the Ministry for Public Education (Bidolli Reference Bidolli, Bidolli and Soldani2001, 82), had been adopted in 1868. This had envisaged the potential inclusion of agricultural issues in the programmes of the scuole normali, but had proved ineffective because of the haphazard manner of its implementation.

The optional nature of the teaching of agronomy, the main obstacle to the realisation of agricultural awareness in the scuole normali, was finally overcome by the reforms undertaken in 1880 by De Sanctis, the minister, which made it compulsory in the scuole normali for young men, and by the introduction in 1886 of instruction in horticulture and silkworm breeding in the scuole normali for young women. Moreover, the complex issues raised by the educational and organisational aspects of teaching agriculture at these institutes had led Tito Pasqui, then lecturer in Agronomy at the scuola normale in Forlì and later head of the Agriculture Department in the MAIC, towards some important reflections:

In a report on the teaching of agronomy at Forlì's scuola normale for young men in the 1882–3 school year, it was emphasised that the programme drawn up should not and could not ‘be fashioned on one single model’: room to manoeuvre was therefore left to individual lecturers, who were supposed to prepare courses tailored to their specific geographical location, thus hopefully avoiding complaints about any disconnection between the teaching topics and the agricultural environment of that particular territory. Bartolomeo Moreschi, a lecturer at the city's Royal Technical Institute, followed a particular programme based, for Year 1, on botany, weather and climate conditions, and geographical and soil conditions; for Year 2, on man's role in crop cultivation; and for Year 3, on specialised crops and secondary agricultural production, animal husbandry, and the rural economy and farm accounting.Footnote ¹²

On all the courses in Forlì, the nature of the teaching was practical: students looked at examples of living and dried plants, analysing their structure by directly examining fresh samples. Classroom teaching was complemented by frequent trips outside, for the purposes of ‘instructional plant collection’. In addition, they used the equipment and specimens in the well-stocked Agricultural Laboratory at the Royal Technical Institute. The theoretical and practical teaching approach envisaged instruction in the main agricultural practices, especially for students in their final year: these included the use of farming implements, pruning, grafting and silkworm breeding. Much of this training took place outside classroom hours, taking up the time allocated for recreation and rest, and relied on the students’ voluntary involvement. The classes in silkworm care, for example, had both a theoretical element, delivered in the classroom, and an element involving practical application, which took place in the early morning and early evening in the silkworm nursery owned by the teacher.

The teaching model applied to the scuole normali, for both men and women, was accompanied by training courses particularly intended for primary school teachers already in post. Conferences and seminars led by experts allowed them to acquire formal accreditation in the teaching of principles of agriculture. The state, and primarily the MAIC, provided funding for these initiatives and subsidised the prizes awarded to teachers who passed the final exams. At the local level, the sponsors of these initiatives were very often the comizi agrari, which had long been encouraged to invest in teacher development. In the Forlì area, this encouragement bore fruit during the 1880s when they promoted a series of conferences on a range of agricultural themes.Footnote ¹³ Courses in agricultural chemistry, given mainly by Alessandro Pasqualini, the director of Forlì's stazione agraria (agricultural research centre), president of the local comizio agrario and a chemistry lecturer at Forlì's Royal Technical Institute, were an integral part of this training programme, which made the teaching of chemistry a preparation for the teaching of agronomy. Pasqualini recalled their impact:

Some comizi, such as those of Cesena and Forlì, established special prizes, with financial support from the Ministry and the province, to reward teachers who had demonstrated their proficiency in conveying the thinking on agronomy (Comizio agrario di Forlì 1886, 122–123).Footnote ¹⁴ Suitable commissions were also established to inspect and check the schools where the teachers who took part in the competition worked; these often consisted of a ministry official and a local expert (normally the director of the comizio agrario), and were charged with assessing the level of the pupils’ learning using an exam based on the programme undertaken during the year (Comizio agrario di Forlì 1894, 124).

In the 1883–4 school year, agricultural teaching was only delivered in five ‘schools’ in the Cesena area, to 79 pupils in total. The commission responsible for monitoring drew up a ranking list of the classes that had proved to be the most receptive in regard to this field, and also ranked the different teachers based on their teaching skills: the ability to involve pupils and convey information was a key factor in the process of disseminating agricultural knowledge to primary school children. One among them, Arturo Lunedei at the school in Gambettola, a small municipality near Forlì, had especially distinguished himself, not just for his qualities as a teacher but also for his materials:

The conferences on teaching methods and agriculture, and progress in primary school agricultural awareness

By the end of the 1884–5 school year, the number of classes in the Cesena area had tripled, to 15, and the number of pupils involved had more than doubled, to 166.Footnote ¹⁶ The context for these increases was the strengthening of policies pursued by local institutions in support of agricultural training, reflecting national trends. A crucial juncture in this process was the establishment in Cesena, in 1882, of the Regia Scuola pratica di agricoltura ‘Filippo Re’ (‘Filippo Re’ Royal School of Practice in Agriculture).Footnote ¹⁷ This institution, whose launch had the direct involvement of the province, took in students between 14 and 17 years old with the objective of training future land agents and farm managers; over time, it became a reference point for agricultural training both in the Romagna and beyond (Mazzotti Reference Mazzotti2017, 169–186).

The increased spread of agricultural teaching in primary schools was in fact the result of a strategic choice taken by the province for the development of the whole educational chain, in which the ‘Filippo Re’ school was the second link. This interpretation is confirmed by the provincial executive committee's launch in August 1882 of a series of conferences, to be staged in Cesena and lasting 10 or 12 days in total, on ‘pedagogical and agricultural themes’ for the benefit of the province's primary school teachers.Footnote ¹⁸ This was a novel initiative for this province, as is clear from the precautionary qualification, ‘as a simple experiment’, included in the committee's resolution, although the context was a range of policies addressing training. Although similar initiatives had first been launched in 1866 at the instigation of the Minister for Public Education Domenico Berti, it was only in the early 1880s, when Guido Baccelli was the minister, that they really took off; the intention was to generate productive exchanges between primary school teachers on a range of themes, often put forward by the ministry itself (Catarsi Reference Catarsi, Genovesi and Russo1996).

Forlì was one of 12 Italian cities, and the only one in Emilia-Romagna, to host the conferences on education established by decree in 1881 (Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione 1884). Baccelli expressed his high regard for the initiative taken by the province of Forlì in 1882, promising to support it financially and making various suggestions about the instructional approach. The teaching had to ‘demonstrate the close connection between the study of phenomena of agricultural production and the more general study of natural sciences’, while the lecturers were urged to point out ‘the possible inconsistency of many practices and beliefs without going into too much detail on individual crops, instead emphasising fundamental and more general principles that can be demonstrated with arguments simply needing common sense to be understood’.Footnote ¹⁹

The conferences on teaching methods and agriculture drew in a healthy number of participants. The launch year saw the enrolment of 69 schoolteachers, a number replicated the following year, while the total number of attenders ‘considerably exceeded a hundred … among whom were recorded young people from the scuole pubbliche [normali], landowners, farmers and others’.Footnote ²⁰ These participants were actively involved: some were in fact presenters on specific themes suggested by the Ministry. The funds set aside by the province were intended for the primary school teachers who enrolled for the full series, either on their own initiative or sent by their respective local areas, alongside a further 40 or so colleagues who came specifically from the area around Cesena. This investment in local ‘human capital’ was believed to be of great importance, although its effectiveness depended both on the ability of the lecturers to convey knowledge and on the continuation of financial and organisational support from the bodies involved.Footnote ²¹

Among those who played an important part were Filippo Marinelli (Bedei Reference Bedei2014) and Bartolomeo Moreschi.Footnote ²² Marinelli, the director of Forlì's primary school provision, coordinated the part on educational methods, while Moreschi, mentioned earlier, organised the seminars on some of the main agricultural themes at both the local and national level. The seminars addressed cultivation of the three main cereals grown across the Romagna area: wheat, maize and rice. The themes explored included crop rotation, the drying process for maize kernels, the health and nutritional aspects of cereal consumption, and the problem of pellagra. There was no shortage of reflections from Moreschi on the impact of the current agricultural crisis, which had been caused by the competition from American and Asian cereals (Frascani Reference Frascani2012; Cerrito Reference Cerrito2003); in particular, he suggested various strategies for limiting its most severe consequences, primarily based on containing the costs of production.Footnote ²³

The second part of the programme of agricultural conferences centred on methods for growing and harvesting flax and hemp, with particular exploration of provisions for limiting the effects of the crisis affecting hemp growers. Only ‘basic concepts’ were offered in regard to cotton growing, illustrating the fact that the teaching programme had a purely practical function and therefore focused on the typical features of agriculture in the Romagna. Moreschi subsequently published a small book (Reference Moreschi1885) providing an account of the agronomic experiments completed during the period 1881–4.

Meanwhile, basic agricultural education in primary schools showed signs of further improvement. Over a one-year period, from the 1884–5 to 1885–6 school years, the number of primary school classes competing for the prizes for teaching quality rose to 19, while at the same time there was a notable increase in the number of pupils involved, from 166 to 267, especially in the municipalities of Cesena, Cesenatico, Gambettola and Sogliano.Footnote ²⁴ The classes were from the first and second years of primary school, often with both years taught together, and sometimes single-sex. The only exception was Sogliano's weekend school, attended by peasants and small landowners and taught by Antonio Garavini: a successful experiment, subsequently replicated by similar ventures in the Forlì area, which, it was thought, could usefully be extended to other schools. It was also suggested that a small museum of rural implements could be established.

The process of disseminating agricultural knowledge in the Romagna territory, thanks to Moreschi, continued through the 1880s. In 1886, in the provincial capital, he gave 16 lectures in the presence of 46 schoolteachers, with prizes of 20 lire per person, allocated from Ministry grants and comizio agrario funds, awarded to the best participants (Comizio agrario di Forlì 1889, 25–7). Complementing the direct teaching activity, copies of Moreschi's book Memoriale di agricoltura pratica per i coltivatori (Reference Moreschi1878) were distributed.

Additional financial resources were allocated for reimbursement of the travel expenses of schoolteachers who came from outside the city, thus ensuring that those who lived in poor or remote areas could take part. One obstacle that teachers often faced in acquiring professional qualifications was in fact the excessive distance between their schools and the main provincial centres; this was a problem shared with other parts of Italy (De Fort Reference De Fort1995), to the extent that it prompted a request to the Ministry for a special exam session.

In Forlì, too, a significant effort was therefore made to support the teachers, although the practical outcomes of this were not as good as in the Cesena area. From a quick check, it can be seen that of the 19 teachers competing for the teaching quality prizes announced by Cesena's comizio agrario in 1886 at least six had taken part in the conferences on teaching methods and agriculture, demonstrating the positive effects of the training activity funded by the province. There was a similar experience, although a little later, in the Rimini area, in large part thanks to the organisational dynamism of Dino Sbrozzi, the director from 1886 of the city's ‘cattedra ambulante’ (mobile agricultural training service): the year 1889 saw the initiation of a series of lectures on agriculture for primary school teachers, reinforced by courses in theory and practice for Rimini's scuola normale students, and supported by a system of prizes for the best teachers.Footnote ²⁵

New regulations for primary school teachers

Midway through the 1880s, regulatory changes helped to clarify the professional profile of primary school teachers in the agricultural sphere. A Ministry circular of 28 June 1885 decreed that the teaching of agriculture in primary schools would be dependent on teachers acquiring an appropriate certificate: from the next school year onwards, the ministry would only award grants and authorisation ‘to teach elements of agricultural science’ to teachers who had passed the relevant examination at a scuola normale where this teaching was delivered (Ministero di Agricoltura, Industria e Commercio 1885). An alternative was possession of the certificate awarded to teachers after they had taken part in a full series of teaching conferences on agricultural themes, or had attended similar courses promoted by the local comizio agrario or one of the province's non-profit organisations.

At the point when its circular of 1885 was issued, however, the MAIC's approach to financial support for agricultural teaching in primary schools was gradually changing. This was substantially reduced, while preference was given instead to agricultural education delivered at a higher level; this related to the reorganisation and promotion of the network of practical schools and specialist schools in agriculture (Bidolli Reference Bidolli, Bidolli and Soldani2001, 83).

While in the mid 1870s the Scialoja inquiry had concluded that the scuole normali were inadequate for Italy's educational needs (Miceli Reference Miceli2013), during the second half of the 1880s important changes in the Romagna made the system of institutions for training primary school teachers more effective. Forlì's scuola normale for young men, the only one in the province, which dated back to the era of papal rule and had then been adopted by the new Kingdom of Italy (Provincia di Forlì 1867, 150), was closed in 1886. At the same time, the scuola superiore femminile in Forlì was converted into the Regia scuola normale femminile (Royal scuola normale for young women), and then just a few years later another scuola normale for young men was established in Forlimpopoli (Carboni, Fornasari and Mazzotti Reference Carboni, Fornasari, Mazzotti, Fornasari and Mazzotti2018, 85–114). At the provincial level, this period saw a marked growth in the number of girls enrolling in urban schools in general, by 1887 apparently matching the number of boys, while in rural schools there continued to be significantly more boys than girls (Comune di Forlì 1888). Changes in the local configuration of scuole normali reflected more general trends at the national level: the transfer of these schools from towns and cities to rural centres, and an increased demand for women teachers that was driven not only by the wider distribution of scuole normali for young women but also by the financial advantages of employing women teachers, on lower salaries, rather than men.Footnote ²⁶

Subsequently, in the early 1890s, the dissemination of agricultural awareness at the primary school level in the district of Forlì was to experience a significant decline. The signs of this were apparent in the number of schools where agriculture was taught, which was low in relation to the Ministry's expectations, and in the progressive numerical decline of both teachers and pupils taking part in the prize competitions. In 1890, there were only three schoolteachers who had earned the certificate in agricultural teaching and were engaged in two strands of instruction, in the primary schools by day and with adults in the evening (Comizio agrario di Forlì 1894, 68–72). Turning to the pupils, there were 229 entrants for the competition in the Cesena area in 1892, of whom only 185 actually took the examination: these numbers represented a sharp drop from those of the previous five-year period, while the reduced number of teachers competing, at half that of 1886, was also significant. The commissioners provided their analysis of this trend:

The main reason for the increasing lack of interest in taking part in the prize competition was said to be the reduction in grants from the comizio agrario. However, this could not really have been the reason, because although the value of prizes for the highest ranked had been reduced, the total sum available for prizes was higher; in other words, the comizio intended to distribute the rewards to a broader range of beneficiaries. This means of providing an incentive for participation in the competitions in fact proved ineffective, insofar as it had a negative impact on the extent of commitment from teachers and thus, indirectly, on the number of pupils who sat the final examination.

Inadequate remuneration for the schoolteachers involved in teaching agriculture, which required an additional commitment, was a further deterrent to improvements in the quality of the instruction; this was recognised by the governmental inspectors, who declared their willingness to support, within the Ministry, potential requests for the allocation of financial incentives to deserving teachers. The issue was in fact important at the national level. In the Forlì area, it raised questions about the ways of funding teacher development: it was argued that this should not fall only to local public and private institutions, or to fundraising activity by the comizi agrari, but should involve the state directly. Moreover, the system of financing established by the provincial executive committee, whereby only those trainee teachers who were resident in the province had received direct funding, was revised at the start of the 1890s with a significant rationalisation and reduction in grants, to the detriment of every type of local educational establishment except Forlì's scuola normale for young women, which was held to be an excellent institution capable of responding to the growing need for teaching staff (Deputazione provinciale di Forlì 1892). At much the same time, running counter to the wishes expressed locally, financial support from the MAIC came to an end: it was held to be too burdensome in view of the economic crisis that Italy faced in the 1890s. The government's shift in position led to a hiatus in the development of agricultural awareness, with negative repercussions for primary schools in the Romagna.

Agricultural education: the unresolved issues

The national picture thus seemed to be evolving, in response to the socio-economic and legislative changes under way in Italy during the 1890s. Increased popular unrest and the growing strength of the labour and peasant movements, from the North to the South, led part of the liberal ruling class into expressing open hostility towards the new teaching programmes put forward by the ministerial commission that in 1888 was given responsibility for reorganising primary education. These new programmes were drawn up by Aristide Gabelli and Pasquale Villari, who were leading figures in the positivist approach to education (De Fort Reference De Fort1996, 147–8; Bonetta Reference Bonetta1997). In the views of some people, exemplified by parliamentary deputy Emilio Bianchi's comments of June 1893, they seemed too advanced:

The issue of practical and manual work in primary schools remained central to the debate between educationalists both in Italy and elsewhere, in tandem with considerations of a political nature expressed by some parliamentary deputies on the subject of education for the working classes.Footnote ²⁹ The different views saw manual work as either a means for the pupil's development from the educational perspective, or a way of developing their skills prior to entering employment. In various parts of Europe experiments had been launched that had not, however, had satisfactory outcomes, at least in regard to the teaching of technical subjects. Professor Paolo Luotto, speaking at the prizegiving for primary schools in the Cesena area for the school year of 1890–1, emphasised that in the case of agricultural teaching, in his view, many of the issues relating to poor skills development and the limited educational benefit of manual work had been resolved (Luotto Reference Luotto1892).

The plan for reform that Education Minister Baccelli presented in 1894 had as its cornerstone the motto ‘instruct the people as much as is needed, educate them as much as is possible’. The intention was to boost the education sector but at the same time protect the status quo, encouraging ‘social reconciliation’. The concluding report, compiled by the commission responsible for implementing the plan, recalled the approach expressed in earlier years by Nicola Miraglia, based on the idea that agricultural education for primary school pupils should encourage them to both welcome and generate innovation in the economy's primary sector. Central, once again, were the themes of dissemination of agricultural knowledge in primary schools, manual work, and, linked to this, the use of small patches of land – ‘campicelli’ (‘mini-fields’), as they were known – where primary school pupils, guided by their rural schoolteachers, could perform practical activities and experiments (Catarsi Reference Catarsi1990, 220–4). This controversial plan, which some called the ‘progetto dei campicelli’ (‘mini-field plan’), became law in 1899, generating a fair amount of support but also a degree of puzzlement. According to Ester De Fort, ‘the campicelli, without the necessary equipment, remained an isolated experiment with no real potential’ (1996, 159).Footnote ³⁰