Compulsory primary school (Coppino law)

The story

A country of illiterates

In 1861, when the Kingdom of Italy was born, three Italians out of four could neither read nor write. In some regions, above all in the South and in the countryside, more than nine people out of ten were illiterate. Many children, at six or seven years old, were already working in the fields, in the mines or in workshops, and poor families had neither the time nor the money to send them to school. In many villages there were not even school buildings, and the teachers, who were paid little, were often poorly trained.

The problem had been seen even before unification. In the Kingdom of Sardinia, in 1859 the minister Gabrio Casati had passed a law that organised education: after unification in 1861 it was extended to the whole of Italy. The Casati Law provided for two years of free primary school, in theory compulsory for children. But in reality it was left to the municipalities, which had to pay for teachers and premises, and many poor municipalities did not do so. Nobody checked whether children went to school, and there were no penalties for parents who did not send them.

The Coppino Law

After years of discussion, on 15 July 1877 Parliament passed a new law, proposed by the Minister of Education Michele Coppino. The “Coppino Law” laid down that all children, boys and girls, from six to nine years old, had to attend primary school, for a three-year course. Parents who did not send their children to school had to pay fines, although in practice these penalties were rarely applied. The municipalities had to organise the schools and pay the teachers.

There were other new things. The law removed the teaching of the Catholic religion from the compulsory subjects, and replaced it with the “first notions of the duties of man and of the citizen”: it was a sign of a more secular state school. It also provided that teachers should have adequate training, and that school should teach reading, writing and arithmetic, and the basics of history, geography and science.

A school hard to fill

Making school compulsory was not enough. Many families, very poor, did not want to give up their children's work, which brought home a little money, or often did not understand what school was for. There was a lack of classrooms, desks and books, and in many villages male and female teachers lived in difficult conditions. Many women teachers, often very young, taught in small isolated mountain or country villages, on very low salaries. The children who attended often lived far from home, with few books and, in winter, no shoes.

Yet things slowly changed. Books were circulating in schools that told stories for the new Italy: “Cuore” (“Heart”) by Edmondo De Amicis (1886), the diary of a boy, which showed the life of a class in Turin and taught a sense of duty and solidarity, and “The Adventures of Pinocchio” by Carlo Collodi (1881–83), the story of a puppet who grows up.

A class in those years was very different from one today: often a single cold room, with wooden two-seater desks, the blackboard, the inkwell and the pen nib for writing in exercise books, and the teacher keeping together children of different ages. They learned by heart, recited the times tables in chorus and copied pages from the primer.

The later stages

In 1904 the Orlando Law raised compulsory schooling to twelve years old; in 1911 the Daneo-Credaro Law put primary schools in the hands of the State, taking them away from poor municipalities; in 1923 the Gentile reform raised the school-leaving age to fourteen. In 1962 the single middle school, the same for everyone, was established, and in 2007 compulsory education was extended to ten years, up to the age of sixteen.