The 1923 Gentile reform was the first major Italian education overhaul since unification.

Evidence

In 1923 the Mussolini government put through the first major reform of Italian education since the unification of the country sixty years earlier and the adoption of the Piedmontese educational system, as laid down by the Casati Act of 1859. The reform was drafted by, and named after, the idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who was Mussolini’s Minister of Education; but its main lines had in fact been worked out by Croce, who had held the same post in the Giolitti government of 1921. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 321