The Film «Scuola Elementare» (1954): an Ambivalent Representation of Educational Culture on the Brink of the Italian Economic Boom

The contribution is the abstract of a presentation on the school representation conveyed by the film Scuola elementare (1954), directed by Alberto Lattuada. The movie meaningfully mirrors life in Italian primary schools during the country’s shift from a rural to an industrial society. It tells the story of a teacher who moves from a small town in central Italy to Milan, the big city on the brink of the economic boom. The teacher experiences tension between the ideals of his profession – understood as a true humanitarian mission – and the attractions of consumerism. A tension that also imbues the film’s representation of educational materiality as opposed to the new lifestyles. In keeping with recent interpretative perspectives within educational historiography, the paper examines these contrasts between different material spaces and objects in terms of their symbolic meaning, with a view to analysing how they reflect a more general and ambivalent representation of educational ideas, values, and practices.