Giuseppe Lombardo Radice (1879-1938) was one of the main figures in Italian pedagogy in the first half of the 20th century and collaborated with the philosopher Giovanni Gentile on the 1923 reform of the Italian school system. However, his work ‘for’ and ‘with’ many elementary school teachers also left important and long-lasting traces beyond Italy’s borders, in Switzerland, Spain, Central Europe, and the North Adriatic, thanks to his intense international contacts with several scholars, foremost among them Adolphe Ferrière and Lorenzo Luzuriaga.
A rediscovery of Lombardo Radice will open up new research avenues in different fields of the History of Education, History of Elementary Schools, and History of Teacher Education, because his original thinking about the primacy of the educational relationship between teacher and pupils, a new concept of school discipline and his idea of the scuola serena also accorded him a unique role in the international movement of New School Education. Moreover, his research among previously unknown popular elementary schools in Italy and the Italian-speaking Tessin region in Switzerland adopted a heuristic perspective, comparable to current studies on the material culture of schools.
