The voice of hungry minds: the relevance of Danilo Dolci for the Cultural Psychology of Education

Abstract

Danilo Dolci (1924-1997) was an Italian intellectual, social activist, sociologist, popular educator, and poet, who spent his life in the rural areas of Sicily, trying to develop a progressive view of education as part of the population’s development and liberation from both poverty and organized crime. The core of Dolci’s pedagogy was the idea of the citizen as a learner and the learner as a citizen. His ideal of education, also referring to Freire and Gandhi, was the “citizen of the world”, able to overcome a colonialist and oppressive attitude to say that one’s own heritage is better than any other in the world. Instead, to Dolci, what I am originates in my cultural roots and makes me able to recognize that I am equal to the other people in the world. To develop his pedagogical ideal, Dolci relies on aesthetics and praxis, recognizing the value of the human being as part of the nature. I finally discuss how Dolci’s views on education can provide new useful perspectives to the development of the cultural psychology of education.