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On Gramsci.

Article Excerpt
Antonio Gramsci was born in Sardinia in 1891 and died in Rome in 1937. Frail from birth--he was less than five feet tall--he suffered from poor health throughout much of his life. Awarded a scholarship to attend the University of Turin, he joined the Socialist Party in 1914, on the eve of the Great War. Seven years later, already well-known as a journalist and as a leader of Turin's insurgent factory council movement, Gramsci joined a walkout at a Socialist congress in Livorno and helped to found the Italian Communist Party, subsequently representing the party as a member of Parliament. In 1926, four years after the rise to power of Mussolini's fascists, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned, despite his immunity as a legislator. While in prison, he kept a series of notebooks that were posthumously published starting in 1948--thus securing Gramsci's reputation as perhaps the most original Marxist thinker of his generation.

There is no significant phase of Antonio Gramsci's life, political activity, and writings in which some aspect or another of educational theory and practice does not figure prominently. The very fact that he was able to acquire an education at all, let alone go on to become one of the leading intellectuals of his generation, is remarkable in itself. His physical debility and his family's straitened circumstances, to say nothing of the logistical difficulties of having to attend schools that were far from his small town of Ghilarza, he seems to have overcome through sheer determination. How he managed to compensate for the woeful inadequacies of the Sardinian schools (themselves on the periphery of the notoriously weak Italian educational system) he attended, with their primitive facilities, retrograde pedagogical practices, and many poorly qualified teachers, is not so easy to explain.

The letters he wrote to his family during his years in prison contain many retrospective vignettes of his childhood from which one gathers that while he greatly...