This year we celebrate the centenary of the birth of Mario Lodi, a special teacher and man, one of the greatest exponents of Italian pedagogy, whose name is remembered alongside Don Milani, Gianni Rodari, Loris Malaguzzi. To educate for peace was for him a mandatory imperative and for this reason during his life he worked hard to redesign a school based on non-authoritarian methods that would form free and democratic children.
Mario Lodi was against the culture of war, of weapons, of arrogance and, like his friend Rodari, was convinced that “peace must be made before war, not after, when everything is already destroyed”.
Some of the titles that stand out from the long bibliography are worth more than a thousand words to illustrate his commitment to the culture of the child and the culture of peace: “Cominciare dal bambino”, “Mondo bambino”, “I diritti del bambino”, “Bambini e cannoni”, “La Costituzione riscritta per i bambini”, “Insieme”, “Fiabe italiane inventate dai bambini di oggi”, “Favole di pace”. And the latter work collects 14 stories, born in the school from children’s ideas, that teach to repudiate war and conflicts, to privilege peace, friendship, imagination, non-violent relationships.
Never as now do we need the teacher Lodi, to recover his stories, his lessons, his way of doing school and talking to young people. His texts can be very helpful to parents and teachers who, in this period, have to face with their children a terrible topic that is unfortunately close to all of us: war.
