Habsburg Legislation on the Training of Elementary and Ginnasio-Liceo (Secondary) Teachers and its Implementation in the Italian Territories across the 18th and 19th Centuries

The debate on teacher education tends to focus on current phenomena and situations that may be most clearly understood and assessed when we are informed by a thorough background knowledge of past events.1 Hence the value of looking back at the origins of teacher training, which predate the unification of Italy, and particularly the – then avantgarde – legislation introduced by the Austrian Habsburg Monarchy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its implementation in the Italian territories. In this paper, I offer a brief outline of the main lines of development under the Habsburgs in the training of elementary school and ginnasio teachers respectively, analysing the differences between them, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and how in some respects they strikingly prefigured key themes in contemporary teacher education.