Joseph Gravina

This paper is a critical reading of Philip Caruana’s study of citizenship education and is based on a theoretical analysis of, amongst others, his suggestion to synthesise national identity and shared fate concepts in order to improve the effectiveness of education for citizenship. The promotion of democratic citizenship is considered restrictive both because it is intended to mould as well as because it applies exclusively what it considers ‘liberal’ ideals. The critical exercise leads to the reworking of a broader programme for which the main areas of knowledge are traced: the state, the economy and culture. This, it is claimed, along with a relevant contribution of studies about the Maltese experience related to the study, also prepares for a return of social and economic interests to citizenship education. At the same time, a wider global view of world events is attempted, away from institutionalised canonical versions. Only in this way, it is claimed, can a political education curriculum be more effective.

‘Please sir, I want some more.’ When programmes in education for democracy and citizenship do not reach out far enough.

Antonio Gramsci adopted concepts from others only to develop them further and not necessarily along the same path as in their original context. ‘Passive revolution’ assisted Vincenzo Cuoco to explain the short-lived top down democratisation of the Neapolitan State in 1799. Gramsci generalised it to explain the Italian Risorgimento and the bourgeois state it bore. He denoted it as ‘revolution without a revolution’ in contrast with post-1789 France. Besides state formation, Gramsci enriched passive revolution by associating it with the political subterfuges of ‘transformism’ and ‘technicisation’. He experimented with the term further by expanding its historical limits to embrace the Fascist regime and, economically, Fordist inroads from across the Atlantic. This paper focuses on these (and other) fundamental stages in the narrative of the Italian political state and economic development accompanying it. Therein, the concept of hegemony – arguably Gramsci’s most evocative – is added in order to meaningfully contextualise the social formation and social relations within. In this case, a ‘negative’ reading of passive revolution portrays it as a failure of hegemonic strategy; the people are not successfully educated and absorbed within bourgeois universal values. Consequently, besides broad socio-pedagogic dynamics, the formal education institution and private institutions double their effort to educate hegemonic leadership in political and socio-economic terms. This role as expressed by the main legislative acts created by the Piedmontese, the Fascists, the Christian Democrats and one of Berlusconi’s governments is analysed in order to indicate the deliberate links set between formal education and the economy through the identification of specific goals promoted by these institutions, and, throughout, how passive revolution can assist in meaningfully explaining such developments.