In Search of a New Subject

With the new century, the child seemed to be seen as more kind-hearted, or at least less naughty. This was no doubt due to the decline of the Lombrosian influence. The first generation of childhood scholars—Perez, Compayré, Preyer—continued to be indispensable points of reference, but their thinking was interpreted in a new way. Pedagogist Luigi Visconti writes: ‘It is indisputable that children often appear hard-hearted and cruel. In the books of those who have dealt with childhood by meticulously collecting facts and anecdotes, it is easy to find apparent proof of the alleged cruelty of the child’. However, the child’s cruelty was more apparent than substantive: ‘alongside the tales and anecdotes that present the ugly sides of childhood, there is the story of the child’s tenderness and solicitude for the happiness of those around him’. While, in Paola Lombroso’s eyes, the goodness was apparent and the cruelty real, after a few years the relationship was reversed and seeming cruelty hides actual goodness. After decades in which they had been considered close relatives, the two figures of the child and the savage became distant, and only the latter remained evil: ‘it can easily be concluded that the cruelty of children is not that of savages, and that it is far from being of a calculated and reflexive selfishness’. Pasquale Rossi, a physician and sociologist, socialist, and director of the ‘Archives of Collective Psychology and Related Sciences’, also repeated this thesis: ‘Thus the savage is cruel, knowing that he is cruel, he is consciously selfish, he lies because he believes it is good to lie: in him there is an adaptation of the psyche to a lower state of the environment, while in the child all this is lacking: he is, indeed and above all, ignorant and unconscious. Hence, we who feel horror for the savage instead love the child, who brings in his every act so much expansion of aesthetic enjoyment and humour, so much fragrance of grace and goodness’. Convinced that the child, if not born good, nonetheless becomes so within a few years, was teacher Ugo Padula: ‘Whether the child is originally good or bad, it is, it seems to me, idle to inquire now: he is the fruit of heredity and, at the age when he enters school, also of the family environment. Removing the cases in which these two factors have deleteriously affected the spirit of the child, I believe that, at the age of six, he is inclined rather to good than to evil’. An echo of this more accepting view can be found in Emilia Formiggini, a teacher and historian of pedagogy: ‘Repeated experimental studies especially in recent times have demolished the a priori principles about original human wickedness or goodness’. With innate wickedness out of the way, society has a greater responsibility in guiding moral sentiment: ‘the affirmation that man, just as he is not born good, also does not have in him the inheritance of sin left to him by the progenitor of the human family, gives rise to a greater social responsibility’. In short, teachers, doctors, pedagogists agreed on seeing a better subject-child.