A scuola di nonviolenza con Idana Pescioli (1922-2016)

Idana Pescioli worked to create a culture of peace inspired by Gandhian nonviolence in the Italian school of the second post-war period, that she elaborated through the Aldo Capitini’s perspective. Nonviolence, as a lifestyle and as an educational practice, became a concrete reality in the Pescioli’s school; first when she was a primary school teacher and then when she was engaged in the pedagogical experimentation at the University of Florence. Through the comparison between the Capitini’s and Pescioli’s nonviolent perspectives, many similarities emerge but also some differences that explain the complexity and the originality of Pescioli’s ideas about a primary school as a place where promote an aware citizenship for the construction of a participatory democracy, an expression of the Capitinian co-presence of every human being. Idana Pescioli did not add nonviolence to education, as Capitini suggested, but to recognize that education is nonviolent practice or is not education.