From Tutor to Teacher: The Birth of Popular Schooling in Early 19th Century Italy.

At least two factors helped to introducing monitorial teaching in Italy before Unification. First, a general new trust on the powers of methods was certainly significant. Second, the identification of some characteristics that enabled monitorial teaching – to be used anywhere because it did not require a long period of teacher training – reinforced the favorable impression. It was monitorial teaching and its innovations that led to a change that spanned the whole of the 19th century and made the passage from the figure of tutor to teacher irreversible: the first used the individual method, the second the simultaneous or monitorial teaching method (and, in some cases, a combination of the two). The school experiences inspired by monitorial teaching were an important stimulus for change and the assertion of an increasingly widespread and uniform ‘grammar of school’. The use of the most advanced European teaching methods in the variegated social conditions in Italy, marked by an extremely low level of schooling and economic funding, was a great and challenging undertaking that had a positive influence on the development of the school in the Kingdom of Italy.