Gramsci rejects religious schooling by infantilizing the people as primitives.
Evidence
The Gentile Reform provided for compulsory religious education in Italian schools, and Gentile’s justifications of this are criticised by Gramsci in Int., pp. 116-18: ”… Gentile’s thinking … is nothing more than an extension of the idea that ‘religion is good for the people’ (people = child = primitive phase of thought to which religion corresponds, etc.), i.e. a (tendentious) abandonment of the aim of educating the people … Gentile’s historicism is of a very degenerate kind: it is the historicism of those jurists f or whom the knout is not a knout when it is an ‘historical’ knout. Moreover, its ideas are extremely vague and confused. The fact that a ‘dogmatic’ exposition of scientific ideas and a certain ‘mythology’ are necessary in the primary school does not mean that the dogma and the mythology have to be precisely those of religion.” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1857
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: Distinguishes two senses of ‘dogma’: pedagogical simplification of science versus religious mythology — a distinction the reader’s toolkit on how ideas are transmitted could use.
- XREF: Connects to Gramsci’s core concept of education and hegemony: how the state molds common sense through schooling, foundational for later Islamophobia-inflected education critiques.
Related
- Secular philosophies failed to construct their own education for children (similarity 0.82)
- Gentile’s 1923 school reform tried to synthesize Italian high culture under the national ideal. (similarity 0.80)
- Common sense layers sedimented historical beliefs with crude realistic elements, remaining acritical (similarity 0.78)