Letter to a Teacher by Schoolboys of Barbiana

Most academic courses about education are centered around theories and models produced by academics. It is unfortunate that very few prospective teachers ever get to hear the stories of education written by the best educators of the world - those who have experimented with schooling but do not necessarily have degrees in education. When such stalwarts as Gandhi and Tolstoy are ignored by the academic world, it is no wonder that no one ever hears of a small book written by a group of poor children from a tiny, obscure school in Italy.

Barbiana is a community of about 20 farmhouses in the hills of Tuscany in Italy. Don Lorenzo Milani, a priest assigned to the village, founded the School of Barbiana in the early 1960s, initially intending it as a night school for the working people. He soon realized that the needs of the children on the farms scattered nearby were even more critical. Most of these children had either failed their exams and left school or were bitterly discouraged with the way they were being taught. He gathered about 10 boys, 11- to 13-year-olds, and gave them a full schedule of eight hours' school work, seven days a week. The older children devoted a great deal of their time to teaching or drilling the younger ones. All the students gave many hours to the study and understanding of problems that were directly significant to their own lives, and, in line with such concerns, eight students from the school wrote the Letter to a Teacher as a full-year project. It was first published as a book in 1969 and was a best-seller in Italy. It has since been published subsequently in many languages.

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