Abstract

This article sets out to synthesize and question several passages dealing with educational issues in the writings of Antonio Gramsci, in particular the project of building a “common school” (scuola unitaria) and, more generally, what is called the “pedagogical relationship”. These occasional and apparently random remarks we find scattered throughout the Prison Notebooks are used by Gramsci to refine the concepts of power and hegemony, which they help to formalize. For Gramsci, hegemony is in fact an “educational relation”. These remarks enable us to identify certain ambiguities prefiguring those involved in the theories of symbolic domination, and which the critical sociology of education will make great use of. However the remarks also open up other potential paths leading into the heart of the philosophy of praxis, with its focus on the necessary and possible development of a “collective name”, intimately associated with the development of a “singular noun”. If we avoid the temptation to distort it by granting it a mythical status, the project of the “scuola unitaria” retains its relevance today, insofar as it makes the case for certain potentialities which, till now, have scarcely been actualised through the historical deployment of schooling.