A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #25 - When everything is private we will be deprived of everything - Paola Perullo (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

If you want to understand how much the dominant ideas have influenced 
and influence the pedagogical choices, which determine the culture of 
childhood in the various historical eras, just read the programs of 
nursery schools, formerly called "kindergartens", from the 1914 Programs 
to the Orientations of 1969. The so-called kindergartens essentially 
carried out a welfare function, with a vision of the pre-school child, 
which considered him incomplete as a human being, and to be "trained", 
to face what was considered true schooling, primary school. The 
fundamental evolutionary stage for the conception of childhood will be 
marked by Maria Montessori, with what she identified with "scientific 
pedagogy", in particular by welcoming discoveries in the medical and 
psychological fields with respect to the development of the child. All 
this to arrive at a new pedagogical method designed for the child.

As regards the conception of educational services for ages 0-3, we start 
from exclusively welfare institutions, supporting single mothers or in 
any case mothers who had to work, even with very young children. It was 
called OMNI, Opera Nazionale Maternità e Infanzia, a welfare institution 
founded in 1925 and dissolved with law No. 698 of 23 December 1975. With 
the latter, the already international functions will remain attributed 
to the State and exercised by the Ministry of Health. exercised by the 
OMNI, while the administrative functions relating to nurseries and 
clinics will be attributed to the Municipalities. Starting from the late 
1970s, there was a great cultural ferment in support of an updated 
vision of child development from birth to three years. And all those 
that were scientific discoveries in the human biological field were 
accepted by pedagogical studies, for a radical transformation of the 
concept of services for children, in particular nursery schools. Many 
Italian regions invested in this cultural change, including Tuscany, 
where an innovative pedagogical method was identified, which, starting 
from precise knowledge of the needs of boys and girls from 0 to 3 years 
old, went on to review and build the entire organization of these 
services, in times, spaces, materials and above all in the relationship, 
by which the numerical ratio between teachers and children was defined 
from a regulatory point of view, differentiated by age, infants, 
half-year-olds and weaned children. The method was defined as 
"psychomotor-based", and was a precise way of conceiving the child, seen 
as the protagonist, active builder of his knowledge, through the free 
expression of his movement, his way of exploring and discovering, his 
way of inventing thoughts and words. In fact, while the teacher's role 
was strongly centered on listening and observation-detection of the 
"significant traces" that the child left as an imprint of his actions, 
regulation occurred indirectly through the mediation of spaces, times 
and materials. , constantly modified by the teacher, based on 
observation, in a sort of educational "direction". The crucial moment of 
this methodology, and at the same time, the starting point of the 
observation which determined different pedagogical strategies, depending 
on the characteristics of the individual children, was the 
"psychomotricity session", which took place in a room, a special place 
that was accessed through a path of desire, which is known through 
pleasure and emotion. A highly symbolic place, where the child could 
modify reality, attribute and communicate meanings. We can say, a place 
where objects and space "awaited" the child's meanings. A real "staging" 
of a pedagogy adjusted to the psychomotor expressiveness of the child, 
where the child became a subject who can "say himself" according to his 
own modalities, and where this "saying himself" was recognized, 
accepted, open to the possibilities of communication and evolution. 
Thus, the still young child, who has few performances, could be helped 
to project his own images, his own symbolic, outside of himself.

It was work on the body and emotions according to a dynamic model, 
capable of managing disharmonies to produce change. All this represented 
a strong public investment, even if it only concerned the 
Municipalities, and above all a quality pedagogical culture, offered to 
everyone, without distinctions of social classes. A model to guarantee 
everyone a better educational approach, based on natural methods of 
learning and motivation, as was the psychomotor-based project, today 
risks becoming a memory, because having increasingly handed over the 
management of services to private individuals 0 -3 years, meant 
maintaining the form but changing the substance because it costs too 
much to maintain that model if it is intended for everyone. If, however, 
as is happening, you want to transfer years of research and experiments 
carried out in the public sector into private areas considered to be of 
excellence also for the treatment of certain problems of child 
development, you can turn it into a business, because it charges like a 
medical performance, an observation made with the psychomotor-based 
method. By doing so, instead of disseminating projects that improve 
human evolution, starting from the nursery, knowledge and practices are 
privatized and become niche.

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