Sfetcu, Nicolae (2023), The Adventures of Pinocchio – Education, Cunoașterea Științifică, 2:4, 24-27, DOI: 10.58679/CS60212, https://www.cunoasterea.ro/the-adventures-of-pinocchio-education/

Abstract

Carlo Collodi, a positive representative of the Italian petty bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth century, presented in the novel the moral virtues of a secularized rural Italy. He inserts moralistic exhortations and reflections in the novel, to give up the waste of time to dedicate to study, hard work and savings. Pinocchio’s negative experiences and the good advice of the Fairy guide him in the end on the right path, after he understood the importance of study and work, thus fulfilling his desire to be transformed into a child.

Keywords: Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio, Pinocchio, education, study, Pinocchio

Rezumat

Carlo Collodi, un reprezentant pozitiv al micii burghezii italiene de la sfârșitul secolului al XIX-lea, a prezentat în roman virtuțile morale ale unei Italie rurale secularizate. Inserează în roman îndemnuri și reflecții moraliste, pentru a renunța la pierderea timpului care să fie dedicat studiului, muncii și economiilor. Experiențele negative ale lui Pinocchio și sfaturile bune ale Zânei îl îndrumă până la urmă pe drumul cel bun, după ce a înțeles importanța studiului și a muncii, împlinindu-și astfel dorința de a fi transformat în copil.

Cuvinte cheie: Carlo Collodi, Aventurile lui Pinocchio, Pinocchio, educația, studiul

CUNOAȘTEREA ȘTIINȚIFICĂ, Volumul 2, Numărul 4, Decembrie 2023, pp. 24-27
ISSN 2821 – 8086, ISSN – L 2821 – 8086, DOI: 10.58679/CS60212
URL: https://www.cunoasterea.ro/the-adventures-of-pinocchio-education/
© 2023 Nicolae Sfetcu. Responsabilitatea conținutului, interpretărilor și opiniilor exprimate revine exclusiv autorilor.

The Adventures of Pinocchio – Education

Nicolae Sfetcu[1]

nicolae@sfetcu.com

[1] Researcher – Romanian Academy – Romanian Committee for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (CRIFST), History of Science Division (DIS), ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0162-9973

Carlo Collodi, a positive representative of the Italian petty bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth century, presented in the novel the moral virtues of a secularized rural Italy. He inserts moralistic exhortations and reflections in the novel, to give up the waste of time to dedicate to study, hard work and savings. Pinocchio’s negative experiences and the good advice of the Fairy guide him in the end on the right path, after he understood the importance of study and work, thus fulfilling his desire to be transformed into a child.

Collodi thus sought to educate young children in newly formed Italy with values that would keep the country united, strong, and prosperous. (Ipsen 2006) As Amy Boylan suggests, the book was written ” during a time when the task of creating an Italian national identity was being passionately discussed by politicians, writers, and socially engaged citizens „. (Boylan 2006) Thus, Pinocchio was transformed into a symbol of the Italian national character, (Panteli 2016) and the explicit bearer of a moral or even political message.

Jeffrey Dirk Wilson publishes an excellent essay (Wilson 2016) comparing The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi with Plato’s Laws, (Plato 1988) finding that both books address the issues of a moral and political crisis, and that neither crisis can be solved without solving the other, and the solution is education, quoting Aristotle in Politics:

„No one will doubt that the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution. The citizen should be moulded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy; and always the better the character, the better the government.” (Aristotle 2017)

The puppet is, in this context, a metaphor for human formation and fulfillment as a citizen. Thus, in the Laws, the Athenian foreigner introduces the puppet inviting the interlocutors to analyze it:

“Let us suppose that each of us living creatures is an ingenious puppet of the gods, whether contrived by way of a toy of theirs or for some serious purpose – for as to that we know nothing; but this we do know, that these inward affections of ours, like sinews or cords, drag us along and, being opposed to each other, pull one against the other to opposite actions; and herein lies the dividing line between goodness and badness.” (Plato 1988)

The Stranger from Laws states that human beings are God’s puppets as a declaration of hope and freedom, rather than despair and resigned determinism, and the laws are the ropes that prevent the puppet from falling.

The themes of childhood and education are predominant in The Adventures of Pinocchio. Childhood becomes a metaphor for the very condition of a newborn nation, Italy, and of a whole people yet to be invented. (Stewart-Steinberg 2011)

Pinocchio is a symbol of disobedience without any awareness, thus rejecting the idea of becoming the model citizen needed for the birth of the Italian state immediately after unification. At the same time, Collodi denounces the complex of legal knowledge (of the school, of the judge, of the doctors) foreign to Pinocchio’s life, sincerity and innocence, but not the possibility to learn to live through a series of experiences uncoded by social norms. (Escola 2020) Pinocchio’s childhood is an opportunity to enhance the rebellious aspect of this period of life, by questioning and overturning both the normative protocols of society and the theological and teleological dimensions of the narrative, by disarticulating the form of linear story characteristic of some such stories. „Collodi is inventing, in fact, an open universe in which the threshold between truth and falsehood is a field that is usually indistinguishable.” (Escola 2020)

Collodi assigns to the school the problematic mission of forming, by educating, an emerging nation.

The Fairy tries to lead Pinocchio from his indolent, careless state to that of a man expelled from Paradise and punished for working for the rest of his life. „Collodi reverses the punishment of man for disobeying God, i.e. a life of hard work, into the pre-requirement for one to deserve and earn humanity.” (Panteli 2016) The Fairy represents the real society, which imposes the rules.

The main imperatives required of Pinocchio are work, kindness, and education. Collodi constantly warns the reader, throughout the story, that disaster is always a possibility: injury, pain, or even death, which Collodi highlights using the archetypal birth-death-rebirth motif. The success of Pinocchio’s evolution is rendered in terms of his metamorphic rebirth as a man in the flesh. (Morrissey and Wunderlich 1983)

Brand and Pertile, in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, assess Pinocchio’s place in Italian culture: „Critics agree that Pinocchio may be read as a kind of Bildungsroman, aimed at showing that for a child to grow into a good citizen he must abandon the puppet within him and become trustworthy, dependable and respectful of society’s rules.” (Brand, Brand, and Pertile 1999)

Bibliography

• Aristotle. 2017. Politics. Lulu.com.
• Boylan, Amy. 2006. “Carving a National Identity: Collodi, Pinocchio, and Post-Unification Italy.” In Approaches to Teaching Collodi’s Pinocchio and Its Adaptations, 18. New York: Michael Sherberg.
• Brand, Charles Peter, Peter Brand, and Lino Pertile. 1999. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. Cambridge University Press.
• Escola, Marc. 2020. “Pinocchio : l’obstination du devenir (revue K).” Text. https://revue-k.univ-lille.fr/. Équipe de recherche Fabula, École Normale Supérieure, 45 rue d’Ulm, 75230 Paris Cedex 05. March 30, 2020. https://www.fabula.org/actualites/pinocchio-l-obstination-du-devenir_95596.php.
• Ipsen, Carl. 2006. Italy in the Age of Pinocchio: Children and Danger in the Liberal Era. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Morrissey, Thomas J., and Richard Wunderlich. 1983. “Death and Rebirth in Pinocchio.” Children’s Literature 11 (1): 64–75. https://doi.org/10.1353/chl.0.0384.
• Panteli, G. 2016. “From Puppet to Cyborg: Posthuman and Postmodern Retellings of the Pinocchio Myth.” Doctoral Thesis, UCL (University College London). Doctoral, UCL (University College London). https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1528658/.
• Plato. 1988. The Laws of Plato. University of Chicago Press.
• Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne. 2011. L’effetto Pinocchio. Italia 1861-1922 la costruzione di una complessa modernità. Roma: Antidoti.
• Wilson, Jefrey Dirk. 2016. “Pinocchio and the Puppet of Plato’s Laws.” In On Civic Republicanism, edited by GEOFFREY C. KELLOW and NEVEN LEDDY, 282–304. Ancient Lessons for Global Politics. University of Toronto Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctt1kk65xt.18.

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