Giuseppe Lombardo Radice anti-Montessorian

Giuseppe Lombardo Radice has gone down in history, at least in popular opinion, as the main detractor of Maria Montessori (Kramer 1976) according to the criticism expressed in 1926 on the occasion of the publication of the third edition (Leenders 1996) of the Metodo della pedagogia scientifica applicato all’educazione infantile nelle Case dei Bambini [The Montessori Method: Scientific Pedagogy as Applied to Child Education in the Children’s Houses], an edition that had been considerably revised in comparison to the two previous editions (Montessori 2000). In 1926, however –​ it should be remembered –​ Lombardo Radice was not only no longer in the service of the Direttore generale dell’Istruzione ele- mentare e popolare, but he was also openly critical of the Fascist government (Meda 2021), unequivocally distancing himself from its policies and its conception of school education. As we will attempt to show in these pages and as already been intuited by De Giorgi (2013, p. 54), it is probable that the Catanian professor’s distance from Montessori’s educational model was based not only on different conceptions of pedagogy, but was also, if not mainly, on political and ideological grounds.