The southern question and the national education in Gaetano Salvemini’s thought

Abstract

In Gaetano Salvemini's thought, the southern question is intimately connected to the scholastic question and the concept of national education: from this point of view, the school is seen by the Apulian intellectual in its role of forming, especially in the South of Italy, a public opinion, which had been absent until then, that would allow a solid national conscience to mature. Salvemini's thought also intersects with a series of political battles of which he is a promoter, above all that relating to the granting of universal suffrage, read as a concrete symbol of the participation of the South of Italy in the destiny of the nation, in terms of political education. In this way, the deleterious welfarist policies would be overcome, allowing the South to find within itself the moral and cultural energies for its own rebirth, thus bringing the process of national unification to completion.