The school in late twentieth century children’s literature. A practical and symbolic space for a subversive pedagogy

Abstract

This essay aims to analyse the school-world narrative in late twentieth century children’s literature, both as an architectural space which condenses the strength of its educational concreteness and as a symbolic space from which the institution’s pedagogical function emerges. The overview of literature that the essay addresses relates to the second half of the twentieth century, a period characterised by a deep cultural revolution that has critically analysed both educational institutions and the hidden ideology that codetermines their practical and symbolic structure. The literary imagery under examination reveals how the school reproduces social and class discriminations that exist in society, thus proposing an unprecedented glimpse of school as a milieu for educational renewal. The literary sources proposed thus play a double role: they bear witness to a real educational scenario and, at the same time, reveal a series of pedagogical models which are unconventional compared to the existing one.