Current Issue
The attention to issues concerning school and education can be traced back throughout the trajectory of Gramsci’s political thought and practice: traces of it can be found in his early writings, as well as in some pre-prison experiences of adult education, and, explicitly, in the pages of the Prison Notebooks. In the literature on educational issues, Gramsci’s meditations on the topic have sometimes been approached through a narrow lens, reluctant to situate them within the broader framework of his research or to connect them with the concrete struggles of the militant and party leader. Only in some more recent readings has a reciprocal "translatability" between political and (broadly speaking) pedagogical problems been identified, as well as the idea that reflection on educational processes should be understood as intrinsic to the philosophy of praxis rather than as a more or less marginal appendage to it. In this sense, new research perspectives are opening up, allowing for interpretations capable of shedding further light on a passage from Notebook 10, included in a text titled Introduction to the Study of Philosophy. Here, reflecting on how a "collective will" can be formed on a permanent basis, and highlighting the importance, in this regard, of the "general question of language," Gramsci broadens his gaze to pedagogy, assigning it a pervasive status, both in the catalogue of knowledge and in the space-time of social and territorial relations. He goes so far as to assert that "the pedagogical relationship cannot be limited to specifically 'scholastic' relationships [...]. This relationship exists throughout society as a whole and for every individual in relation to other individuals, between intellectual and non-intellectual strata, between rulers and ruled, between elites and followers, between leaders and the led, between vanguards and the rank and file. Every relationship of 'hegemony' is necessarily a pedagogical relationship" (Notebook 10 II, § 44: QC, p. 1331).