Merit and Inequality in Antonio Gramsci’s Reflections on Schooling

Abstract

The essay deal with Gramsci’s use of the theme of “merit” in his pages on school and education. In the pre-prison writing, the criticism of the privileges of the wealthier classes, is carried out on the basis of a claim for the merits of the many subjects of proletarian families, unable to cultivate and make them count. In the “prison notebook” this position is inserted in the framework of a New State, in which the ruling class is selected from a social body entirely capable of cognitively partecipating in the self-government of the work. Significant parallels with the bourdesian concepts of habitus and reproduction are also highlighted.