Figure 1.--The school portrait was taken in Cabras, on the west coast of Sardinia. Traditionally, most families were involved in fishing. Click on the image to see a school portrait taken in Cabras during the early-20th century. It had a mixed student group with boys and girls. Here years later we have an all boys class of 35 students. During the Fascist years coeducation was discouraged (1923-45). By the 1950s there were more schools and more children attended them. In Sardinia the literacy rate was only about 30 percent, but by the 1950s has been inceased to nearly 80 percent. [1951 census] Mussolini's Fascist regime did bnot do much for Italianm but literacy seems to have been a substantial achievemen. Here most of the children are wearing school smocks. Notice the wide collars and little blue bows. The boys seem very well dressed. Footwear is still not common. It is liitle hard to tell, but boys all seem to be barefoot. On the mainland you would have seen more children wearing some kind of footwear. Probably many children from fishing families never had any kind of footwear. Notice the warm relationbetween the teacher and the biys. She looks very modern, but notice the woman wih a head scarf in the upper right hand corner--this as no longer very common on the mainland.

This did not change until after World War II when the Italian Economic Miracle began to transform the country (1950s). Notice how well dressed the boys here are and fishing villages were rather poor communities. It reflects the powerful economic forces being unleashed in Italy by capitalism. Also we begin to see flip-flops at the end of the decade, very inexpensive footwear. We see many major changes by the 1950s. The Italian school system had expanded, more school and more children attending them. And as a result, the literacy has increased hugely. We note even in poorer areas like the south and Sardinia that litercy was approxging 80 percent as reported in the 1951 census. Smocks were very common, but unlike earlier decade, we see far fewer childldren coming to school barefoot. Fishing villages as we see here were still an exception (figure 1).

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Created: 10:45 AM 3/10/2024
Last updated: 10:45 AM 3/10/2024