Abstract

Agazzi has been very active in education as teacher, as president of educational institutions, as promoter of educational initiatives and as editor-in- chief of the important pedagogical journal «Nuova Secondaria».

Evandro Agazzi, as everyone, has met education and dealt with its various problems during all his life. He has first received education as a son (the first of three broth­ers). His father Aldo, teacher at primary school, then at a secondary school for school teachers, and finally full professor of Pedagogy and dean at the Catholic University of Milan, was the editor-in-chief of the journals «Scuola e didat- tica» and «Scuola materna» published by Editrice La Scuola of Brescia. He has been a protagonist of the school reforms in the Italian Republic, from the Gonella Commission (1947-1950) till 1991. Evandro’s mother Emma, teacher at primary school and then at secondary school, graduated as educational psychologist, being a recognized expert in religious education.

He has met education in various forms as a student: primary school, secondary and high school in Bergamo, before enrolling at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Catholic University in Milan. After graduation he continued his formation as a stu­dent of Physics at the State University of Milan, then as a postgraduate in Oxford (1960), for an advanced research in Philosophy of Science, and finally in Munster at the Institute for Mathematical Logic and Foundational Research in Mathematics.

G. Bertagna (*)

Department of Human and Social Sciences, University of Bergamo, Bergamo, Italy e-mail: giuseppe.bertagna@unibg.it © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

M. Alai et al. (eds.), Science Between Truth and Ethical Responsibility, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16369-7_10

He has exercised education to earn his living from 1957 to 1964 as teacher in high school and, for some time, also as headmaster of a high school.

He has finally met and exercised education for his own choice, and not only as a profession, from 1965 to 2006 as professor of young university students in Genoa, Pisa, Milan (Catholic University), Fribourg; as a visiting professor or lec­turer in dozens of universities and research centers in all continents, as well as a member of the editorial board of philosophical journals and various national and international associations of Philosophy teachers.

However, Agazzi has never formally cultivated Pedagogy as discipline. At home, he had received a definition of Pedagogy from his father: Pedagogy as «the­ory and practice of education». According to his father, not everyone—though receiving and doing education—intends to reflect professionally on its condi­tions, problems and nature. Moreover, not all of those who take up this profession, because of weakness of character or of thought, manage to formulate their own systematic thesis, defensible in public debate, by critically formulating the grounds of the educational problems they have studied, observed or stumbled upon. There are even less people who consider how, when, why, whether and with which limits their theory of education can be translated, without degenerations, into a personal, interpersonal and social action able to improve the educational status of everybody.

As is well known, those who succeeded in this enterprise would realize the steps of the heuristic chain, typical of any «science»: (1) starting from experience, in this case educational experience; (2) reflecting critically on it starting from hypotheses that explain and justify it; (3) proposing a systematic theory of educational practice; (4) comparing one’s own pedagogical theory with others, in order to attain a unique theory that could optimize the various available proposals; (5) acting intentionally in order to improve the existing educational experience in the light of the criteria taken from the accepted theory(ies); (6) verifying and evaluating the results obtained on quantitative and qualitative bases; (7) eventually, reformulating the theory(ies), also through a serious confrontation with those who have opted for different ones.

In 1983, Editrice La Scuola, hoping in a forthcoming reform of the Italian sec­ondary school (still essentially based on the Gentile reform of 1923), decided to publish «Nuova secondaria», the first monthly journal devoted to the discussion of educational, didactical and cultural problems of this key school level. The Editrice asked Evandro Agazzi, at the time professor of Philosophy of science (then, as is known, he passed to the chair of Theoretical Philosophy in 1997), to be the editor­in-chief of this journal. He accepted and he exercised this function for 28 years, till 2011, when he was appointed director emeritus, writing 280 editorials and sev­eral other articles dealing with important issues regarding the education of young people as well as theoretical debates on Pedagogy.

Despite this task, that led him at the center of Italian Pedagogy, and even if he has always acutely considered the steps (1), (2), (5) and in part, (6) of the heuristic chain mentioned above, Agazzi never intended (perhaps because of mere lack of time or of other academic priorities) to review organically the other three steps, in particular (3) and (4), that would have been perfectly up to his potential. Yet, even if he has never formulated an explicit «systematic theory of education», he had one such background theory, though made explicit only through clues. Otherwise, it would be very difficult to understand that pedagogically unitary mark that he has left on 28 years of «Nuova secondaria», as even the most inattentive and occasional reader easily perceives. The indirect reference to this background theory, moreover, can be found in various of his works of cultural or philosophical nature.

Working on “underlying meanings” is always a difficult enterprise, since the interpreter risks to overlap, even unwittingly, his own ideas to those of the inter­preted theorist. In my case, however, the risk is a bit restrained as, in addition to Evandro’s works, I can make reference to a customary dialogue with him, since 1983,^[103] on pedagogical principles and issues.

With these warnings, I think, however, it is possible to identify at least the fol­lowing pillars that could constitute the framework of a pedagogical theory formu­lated by Agazzi in order to, on one hand, enlighten educational practice and justify it and, on the other hand, learn from practice itself, then acting critically on theory.

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