Italian debates about a modern curriculum in the first half of the 20th century.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the industrial development of many European countries led to a necessary reform of education; its purpose was to ease the entrance of the younger generations into the world of work. As a result, schools were required to provide more technical skills, and to also educate the new ruling class. The teaching of secondary school mathematics in schools with a ‘cultural’ curriculum was therefore assigned the additional task of providing modern tools and methods that could be used in mathematical applications. From this perspective, the secondary curriculum had to aim towards a better integration with its counterpart in higher education, and therefore towards a redefinition of the topics studied. The first official reform of school mathematics programs was in France in 1902, with the creation of the modern curriculum; this was closely followed by the German reform in 1905, and then by those of most other European countries. Despite the interest shown by many Italian mathematicians, and also frequently shown by the Institutions, the Italian school system did not register these changes. Our aim is to identify the causes and the consequences of the Italian attitude during this time. With this in mind, we will retrace the development of the teaching of mathematics in Italian schools that allowed access to the University system, from the unification of Italy to the middle of the 20th century. We will describe the evolution of the programs of the Ginnasio-Liceo, and the development of the physics-mathematics section of the Istituto Tecnico, the school which played the role of a ‘cultural’ school of scientific curriculum until the establishment of the Liceo Scientifico in 1923. We will discuss the debates and the proposals that surrounded the teaching of mathematics at the turn of the 20th century, and, finally, the programs of the Liceo Scientifico and their following modifications (see Marchi & Menghini, 2011). As a result, it will be clear that the setup that inspired the first school programs of the newly unified Italy has remained a dominant feature in Italian schools. It was these programs which led to the position of Italy in the international arena at the beginning of the 20th century, the programs of the Liceo Scientifico of 1923, and the little attention given to all the modifications which aimed to establish a modern model of scientific culture in this same school.