School and Society in Antonio Banfi’s Political Writings: Articles Published in the Communist Daily l’Unità

Abstract

This article explores a largely overlooked dimension of Antonio Banfi’s political and educational writings: the articles on school and society published in the communist daily l’Unità during his years as a Member of Parliament, which have remained outside the mainstream of editorial and historiographical inquiry. Drawing on a systematic review of the principal bibliographies on Banfi and on direct examination of materials held at the Antonio Banfi and Daria Malaguzzi Valeri Archive (Panizzi Library, Reggio Emilia), the study reconstructs the full corpus of 83 miscellaneous articles that appeared in the newspaper. Through qualitative content analysis, it identifies 29 pieces that engage explicitly and in a sustained manner with questions of educational policy and with the relationship between schooling and society. The article elucidates the philological, bibliographical and methodological criteria adopted in selecting, verifying and dating the texts, thereby establishing a critically grounded documentary record. From an interpretative perspective, the findings invite a reassessment of Banfi’s political profile, showing that the pages of the communist daily functioned as a privileged space for pedagogical intervention and for the public articulation of educational concerns complementing, but not reducible to, his work in Parliament.