Paraphrasing an expression of an Italian educator of the Renaissance, Vergerius, who in his turn re-echoed a phrase of Seneca's, it is still possible even today to repeat that that education is liberal which "produces free men." Liberal education, in other words, does not aim at a utilitarian end or a vocational preparation, but looks to the "formation of a personality."

The decade 1926 to 1936 has been one of great importance so far as the organization of the elementary school is concerned, although no conspicuous innovations were introduced either in its internal regime or in its courses of study.

To speak of a really genuine economic-political organization of teachers in Italy would have been impossible before the dawn of the present century. Considering the slight associational activity of the period there were teachers' associations, some indeed notable, in the second half of the nineteenth century, but their aim was exclusively or almost exclusively cultural.

The problem of religious instruction in Italy, as in general in all the Catholic countries, is full of difficulties and is subject to great fluctuations imposed mostly by the changes in the political relations between Church and State, as well as those caused by the changes in philosophical thought in the largest sense of the word. After the Counter-Reformation, in Italy as in other Catholic countries, the school in all its various grades passed under the jurisdiction of the Church, and instruction assumed everywhere a decidedly denominational coloring. It was in this period that the Jesuits, with the help of the Church and the State, triumphed.

Toward the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, in Italy, as in the other nations of Europe, the secondary schools were almost entirely in the hands of the religious orders and especially of the Society of Jesus. The leaders of the Counter-Reformation movement immediately turned their attention to secondary instruction, in which the minds of the governing classes are molded, and though they apparently accepted the humanistic tradition, they deprived it of all its intrinsic vigor, transforming it into an instrument of intellectual domination.

The problem of national education was first raised in its full significance and with full consciousness at the beginning of the nineteenth century by Vincenzo Cuoco. Through him Italy for the first time acquired a clear consciousness of being a political and not merely a linguistic and literary entity, confronted with the task of deriving from its own soul the forces and means for the pursuit of a genuinely autonomous existence, a life of independence and unity.