Eden McLean's Mussolini's Children marks an important contribution to a growing field of scholarship interested in fascist education, a focus that holds relevance well beyond the history of formally fascist nations. The history of fascism in Italy was long, and McLean organizes the book into four periods, dividing up the time between 1922, when Mussolini and the National Fascist Party assumed power, and 1940, when Italy entered World War II and fascist schooling changed exponentially. Mussolini oversaw a number of important infrastructural changes during his reign, the best known of which might be Italy's advances in transportation during the 1920s. Of lesser renown, however, is the expansion and standardization of public schooling in Italy that took place during the Fascist Period. In addition to teaching the formal curriculum, Italian schools, as with schools in other places, also taught lessons in the obedience and hard work. All of the qualities we correlate with fascism and education—the attention to race-building, to recasting national history, and to emphasizing physical fitness—were central to Italian schooling through the Fascist period. Thus, little in Mussolini's Children may be unexpected, even as it is illuminating. Given how much earlier Italy contended with fascism and education than Germany, the most surprising takeaway from this book is that education historians do not give more attention to Italy.
While Italy's push for colonialism and preparation for war took on greater importance in schools across the two decades, the book ultimately traces as much stasis as change. McLean focuses on several important themes throughout the book, beginning with the challenges of developing a sense of italianità (Italianness) in a nation that was fairly new and incredibly diverse. McLean notes the vast differences between southern Italians and those in the north, and she explains, “It was not uncommon for northern or central Italians to describe southern languages as ‘African’ or to attribute the South's poor economic conditions to its population's innate laziness or stupidity” (pp. 9–10). Northern Italians frequently felt they were not just Italian but also tied to the cultures of bordering nations. One of the most fascinating stories in the book is how these regional problems impacted schools. Regional dialects were first made into second languages in the schools and then marginalized completely. Local teachers were fired and replaced with teachers from central Italy. As textbooks became more standardized, pictures and depictions of central Italy came to stand for the entire nation. Italianità was built on uniformity.
Glorifying the Roman Empire and Italian colonialism served a related purpose (in addition to offering a more inspiring look at Italian military history than World War I provided). Textbooks stressed the themes of strength, wisdom, and morality (p. 52) in relation to ancient Rome in order to build a sense of a common Italian race as much as a shared past. Colonizing East Africa echoed the past empire as it also served important geopolitical purposes, including a place for some of Mussolini's imagined 60 million Italians to reside by mid-century. The schools’ attempts to build an “imperial consciousness” (p. 169) also provided an “other” upon which Italians might define themselves. Italians may not have been a heterogeneous group, but they were not Africans. McLean shows in brief but fascinating fashion that Italian race policies in the 1930s became more punitive as war approached and colonialism grew. Schools played an important role in developing the philosophical foundations for these changes.
The attention to physical education, both in school and in youth organizations like the Fascist Italian Youth, is both predictable and shares some qualities with physical education in the United States at the time. Boys were in training to become robust soldiers, girls to become healthy mothers. Given how closely tied physical education was to eugenics in Nazi Germany, it makes sense that McLean seeks to delineate Italian ideas about race and biology. She argues that Italy offered a “stark contrast” (p. 45) to Germany's sterilization and euthanasia racial health policies. Instead, Italy promoted “positive, pronatalist initiatives” (p. 133) like low-cost train fares for honeymooners and longer school days to provide working parents relief. It is unclear to what degree these positive policies really made any difference in schools, given that Nazi Germany also promoted healthy motherhood to young girls. McLean gives little attention to science education, for example, and so it is difficult to know in what ways the curriculum differed from Germany in teaching ideas about race and racial purity, even if governmental policies were pronatalist. She shows that the 1938 Manifesto of Race defined Italians as Aryans and quickly degraded the political situation of Italian Jews. Readers might wonder to what degree this rhetoric had been circulating in particular parts of the curriculum earlier.
Mussolini's Children is a history told largely, but not exclusively, from the vantage point of education leaders like Giovanni Gentile and Cesare Maria De Vecchi di Val Cismon who, over the Fascist period, possessed less and less experience in education and more in fascist doctrine. By 1940, Mussolini was appointing loyalists to the highest positions in the education ministry. McLean's methodology illuminates how Mussolini's ideas were made into school policy. But it is difficult to determine how Italians received the reforms that the book traces, particularly in the rural or geographically peripheral parts of Italy that might have experienced the most change in the face of increasingly compulsory and standardized education. Did Sicilian children buy into italianità as easily as others, and what were their school experiences like? How did Italians in the south and north respond to their own teachers being fired and regional dialects being marginalized? The tumultuous and at times violent history of South Tyrol (or Alto Adige) reflects how attached many Italians were to their regionalisms, and one wonders if they accepted school reforms as enthusiastically as others.
These are certainly the questions of another book and not ones for McLean to answer in depth, but I came away from Mussolini's Children without a strong sense of how ordinary Italians thought about race or school and whether Italian fascism on the ground was really as different from German Nazism as McLean describes it. Children would be an excellent indicator of this because, as she argues, the children who grew up in fascist youth groups and schools were often the most dedicated followers. McLean shows that all of the tensions and anxieties that drove fascism in Europe came into clearer focus in Italy in the 1930s. To quell regional differences, fears about race, and fears of geopolitical irrelevancy, Italy turned to the schools, standardizing them and making them better run, more uniform, and perhaps more politically reactionary places (the contrast is not wholly clear). Italian officials used the schools to convince a population scarred by loss in World War I to close the gap between citizen and soldier and to go to war once again. Mussolini's Children does not set out to be a cautionary tale, but it does compel us to think about the distinctions and shared practices between fascist and democratic schools. As a result, its story can help us to think about others, even as it offers its own compelling tale.
