In Italy in the first decades of the twentieth century there is a strong commitment of intellectuals on political issues, including education policy, thanks to magazines such as La Voce of Prezzolini and Papini but also specific magazines as "Nuovi Doveri" and "L’educazione nazionale”. In such locations Giuseppe Lombardo Radice (1879-1938), who studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and was professor of education at the University of Catania Univesità 1911-1922, leading a fierce polemic against the declining positivistic culture and its implementation in the existing laws about primary and schools for primary teachers and manuals for the initial training of primary school teachers. Like his mentor Giovanni Gentile, GLR is a case of academic who finds himself committed to making proposals for educational reform then allocate to be realized when he became general director of primary education in close connection with the school reform of the minister in the first Mussolini government . In this role, outlining the new programs for the elementary school and the initial training of teachers (teachers college). These programs express an overall idea of ​​popular culture and of teacher of the people, which highlights areas such as religion and literary creativity, art and music. This educational culture is not deaf to international mainstream pedagogical activism and new schools, but will eventually become a cornerstone of the fascist regime in the process of development and consolidation. Its major consequence will be a new generation of textbooks for primary schools and for the initial training of isnegnnati elemenatri. His distancing from fascism appears emblematic of the contradictions of a whole culture and a whole generation of intellectuals.

The research is in the tradition of Italian study of educational culture in its interaction with the events of the educational reforms and with the most comprehensive literature on the commitment of intellectuals in the Europe of the first decades of the twentieth century.

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