L’istruzione elementare nella Provincia di Palermo dopo l’Unità d’Italia

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to the results of a mainly qualitative and partly quantitative investigation on primary schooling in the province of Palermo in the second half of the 19th century carried out within the framework of the Research Project of Significant National Interest Literacy and Development in Southern Italy from Italian Unification to the Giolittian Era (1861-1914). In unified Italy, as the school became ‘one school for one people’, i.e. the main place to strengthen unity through the construction of a national consciousness, it also exasperated the difficulties that this unification process encountered: far from being uniform, society was very heterogeneous, made up of various peripheral and regional articulations. Starting from a historiographical hypothesis that there was not a simple separation between north and south but different school realities in the newly unified Italy, many archival sources found at the State Archive in Palermo and some printed sources consulted at the Central Library of the Sicilian Region were consulted, which rendered the variety, problematic nature and characteristics of elementary education in the post-unification period in the large province of Palermo.