Lavoro e giovani lavoratori alle civiche scuole serali e festive di Milano fra fascismo e dopoguerra

After the Unification of Italy, Milan City Council set up night and Sunday schools offering secondary instruction to young men and women who had gone straight to work on completing elementary school but were eager to further their education and enhance their career prospects in the industrial, commercial, or service sectors. These schools were not designed to meet the prescriptions of the Casati Law regulating state schools and indeed were organized independently of their state-run counterparts. They were de facto post-elementary institutions and conferred a school leaving diploma that was unofficial but whose value was locally recognized. Over a three-year cycle, students were offered both a general education (Italian, history, geography) and vocational training (bookkeeping, drawing, French, commerce).\r\nThis paper examines the changes undergone by the municipal school system in Milan during the fascist era and into the 1950s, within a broader educational culture that emphasized the formative value of work at a time of national economic transformation. During the period under analysis, this system was extended to include vocational schools, accorded equal status to their state-run equivalents, as well as training courses in trades and crafts, industrial processes, and commercial skills. It thus continued to cater for the need, which had already emerged during the Giolitti era, to provide workers with access to elementary and post-elementary education by means of night and Sunday schooling; at the same time, it set out to reinforce the skills base of the local community by offering vocational training. The essay sheds light on the factors driving these innovations, which were initiated in the 1930s with the so-called “adjustments” to the Gentile reform (notably the introduction of vocational and trade schools) and revisited with the resumption of democracy following the Allied liberation of Italy. The analysis offered, which contemplates a period in the history of these schools that has not been the object of study to date, is based on contemporary unpublished and print materials held in local archives.