La deduzione personalistica della democrazia nella pedagogia di Luigi Stefanini

Through a historical reading of the Luigi Stefanini’s philosophy (Treviso 1891 - Padua 1956), this paper presents the democratic theory of education that he elaborates in the years of the Reconstruction. Stefanini proposes a personalistic deduction of democracy, where the educational act becomes a place of event of the social person. Education for democracy coincides with a path of spiritual growth that causes the person in the individual and that has a mystical foundation: first the ego experiences itself and then meets others as similar but singular subjects. In this educational process the teacher is very important, because he acts as an intermediary between the disciple and the absolute Being, helping the student to learn himself and to become the author of his own life. In the context of the educational personalism, since democracy is a form of community life, schools must keep people and communities together as an alternative to the visions that massify man. The school-community must become a place for perfecting existence and democratic education for the common good beyond selfish interests. Educating good is for Stefanini educating a good life that is never referred to the individual, but to the subject-person who realizes his identity together with other subjects and within a community horizon. Stefanini’s personalism creates a pedagogy of the different where the school must be constituted according to the principle of personalization of educational processes, becoming an elective place of equality and of a personalistic foundation of democracy. The proposal for an education that restores the primacy of the person over the individual in the realization of a community and plural democracy, arouses interest and curiosity in the late-modern era where the education is increasingly becoming an individual and solitary enterprise.