The liberators’ reflections on the liberated. An in-depth look at modern illiteracy in Italy.
A historical investigation into the origins of the cognitive problems of a “liberated” country.
The British Empire built its power through military superiority, control of trade routes, colonial administration and an extraordinary ability to present national interest as a universal principle.
The Opium Wars probably represent one of the clearest examples of this contradiction. Britain went so far as to use its military superiority against China after the Qing government attempted to suppress the opium trade originating largely from British-controlled India. The relationship between the tea trade, opium, the East India Company and imperial policy deserves a separate investigation and will be examined elsewhere.
What matters here is the method.
British imperial power had learned that force becomes far more effective when it can be transformed into administration. Conquest can be presented as civilization, economic interest as free trade and political subordination as a necessity of government.
To govern also meant controlling the vocabulary through which power itself was described.
The Formation of the Imperial Man
An empire of such dimensions required officials capable of administering distant populations without constantly questioning the legitimacy of their own role.
For generations, British public schools contributed to the formation of a significant part of the imperial elite. Discipline, hierarchy, self-control, group loyalty and the ability to command were central elements of that educational model.
There was no need to produce men who were personally cruel. It was far more useful to produce men capable of making extremely harsh decisions while continuing to regard themselves as respectable.
The governor signed, the official implemented, the soldier carried out the order and the merchant entered the result in his accounts. Distance between decision and consequence allowed violence gradually to become procedure.
This ability to administer moral distance was one of the invisible infrastructures of Empire.
Educating the Intermediaries
British colonial rule also understood a very simple principle: directly governing millions of people requires immense resources, while educating a local class capable of administering them is considerably more efficient.
In British India this conception received one of its best-known formulations in Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education of 1835, which envisaged the creation of an intermediary class culturally shaped through British categories.
Education therefore assumed a precise political function.
Those who establish school curricula decide which facts deserve to be remembered; those who select textbooks determine which interpretations will appear normal; those who train teachers influence the categories through which subsequent generations will understand society.
Education can therefore become a form of government operating over an exceptionally long period.
This awareness did not disappear with the decline of the British Empire. We find it again, in a different context and through an increasingly Anglo-American structure, in defeated Italy after the Second World War.
Italy in 1943 Was Not a Sovereign Laboratory
The fall of Fascism is often presented as the straightforward beginning of Italy’s democratic reconstruction.
The institutional reality was considerably more complicated.
From 1943 onward, Italy was simultaneously a battlefield, a defeated country and a territory progressively administered by the Allies.
The Allied Military Government, AMG, and later the Allied Control Commission exercised concrete administrative functions in occupied Italy. Education was explicitly among the areas in which they intervened.
Within this apparatus operated an Education Subcommission, responsible for dealing with Italian schools, curricula, textbooks, personnel and universities.
Historical documentation shows Allied involvement in the revision of educational material, the removal of Fascist content and the reorganization of educational institutions. University staff were investigated and professors considered compromised by the previous regime were removed.
One conclusion is therefore difficult to dispute: the first reconstruction of postwar Italian education did not take place under conditions of complete national autonomy.
This does not mean that the Republican school system was simply designed in London or Washington. A substantial part of the Gentile system survived; the Italian Ministry continued to function; Catholics, Communists, Socialists and Liberals fought intensely over the future of education; the Constitution was drafted by Italian representatives.
But all of this took place within the material framework created by military defeat and occupation.
It is within this framework that Carleton Wolsey Washburne appears.
Carleton Wolsey Washburne
Washburne was one of the best-known American progressive educators of his generation, associated with the Winnetka Plan and theories of individualized instruction.
In Italy, however, he did not arrive merely as an academic.
He arrived through the Allied military administration.
Between 1944 and 1946 he held educational positions within the AMG and assumed a central role in the Education Subcommission. During this period he was promoted from major to lieutenant colonel.
The promotion does not prove the existence of a covert project. It does show, however, that Washburne enjoyed the confidence of the apparatus to which he belonged and was progressively entrusted with greater responsibilities.
What followed is even more interesting.
From 1946 to 1948 Washburne became director of the United States Information Service, USIS, for northern Italy.
The man involved in the educational reorganization of occupied Italy therefore moved into the leadership of an American organization devoted to information and cultural influence.
From Education to Information
The USIS was not an educational office.
It was an instrument of American foreign policy designed to disseminate information, publications, cultural materials and messages directed at foreign public opinion.
In Marshall Plan Italy, these activities included books, lectures, films, cultural initiatives and material intended for young people. Through such instruments a particular American political, economic and social model was presented.
Washburne’s professional biography becomes interesting precisely because it crosses both territories.
First education, then information and cultural influence.
The transition was not absolute.
Sources concerning his experience in Italy report that even after joining the USIS, Washburne continued to be consulted on educational matters and remained involved with some of the projects he had previously begun.
Pedagogy and cultural policy therefore overlapped, at least within his own career.
The Office of War Information and the Psychological Warfare Branch
To understand this story fully, we need to examine the information apparatus that accompanied the Allied advance.
The Office of War Information, OWI, was the American agency responsible for a significant part of United States wartime propaganda. Its international activities included producing and distributing material intended to influence public opinion.
The Psychological Warfare Branch, PWB, also operated in the Mediterranean theater.
The name is not a critical label applied retrospectively. That was its actual name.
The organization dealt with propaganda, the press, radio broadcasting, public opinion analysis and the study of the attitudes of populations affected by Allied operations. Psychological warfare was expressly intended to use communication to affect morale, perceptions and behavior.
These activities should not be confused with Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which emerged decades later.
The historically relevant fact is simpler: by the 1940s, Western military organizations already regarded collective perception as an operational field.
Knowing what a population thinks helps determine which messages may influence its attitudes.
The battlefield no longer ended at the front line.
It entered public opinion.
Intelligence and the Education Subcommission
Documentation concerning the Education Subcommission adds another element.
Within the same administrative environment we find personnel carrying out intelligence and counterintelligence functions, including individuals connected with the Counter Intelligence Corps, CIC.
The CIC was not the Education Subcommission and its functions were different. It dealt primarily with security, counterespionage and identifying threats.
This prevents any serious claim that American intelligence services directly ran the Italian school system.
But it also prevents us from imagining education, security, information and intelligence as sealed worlds with no contact between them.
They were different components of an apparatus responsible for administering a defeated country, understanding the attitudes of its population, identifying hostile elements, stabilizing the territory and reorganizing its institutions.
The bureaucratic distinctions remained. The broader political objective was shared.
Washburne and the Public Relations Branch
An archival trace adds a particularly significant piece to the picture.
In his study of the American reconstruction of Italian education, Steven F. White cites a memorandum sent personally by Carleton W. Washburne to the Public Relations Branch of Allied Force Headquarters on September 10, 1945.
The document is preserved at the United States National Archives in Record Group 331, file 10000/144/605.
We do not yet possess the complete text of the memorandum, so attributing unverified purposes to it would be improper.
The documentary fact nevertheless remains interesting.
The man at the center of the Allied educational intervention was communicating directly with the Public Relations Branch of military headquarters.
Considered alone, the memorandum could contain something entirely administrative. Placed within the wider sequence of events, however, it acquires a different significance.
Washburne was involved in schools and textbooks; he communicated with the AFHQ Public Relations Branch; he would later become director of USIS while continuing to deal with educational matters.
This is not proof that education was subordinate to psychological warfare.
It is evidence that the educational circuit did not operate in isolation from the wider Allied communications apparatus.
A Documented Institutional Network
At this point there is no need to invent connections.
The network appears in the documents.
There was the Allied Military Government, responsible for administering occupied territories; an Education Subcommission tasked with educational reorganization; within the same ecosystem there were CIC personnel and other intelligence functions; the Office of War Information managed American propaganda; the Psychological Warfare Branch explicitly conducted psychological warfare operations; after the war the United States Information Service developed American information and cultural influence activities.
These organizations were not a single body and did not constitute some mysterious unified command structure.
That is precisely why the picture is more interesting.
They performed different functions within a system applied to a defeated country: territorial administration, educational reorganization, security, intelligence gathering, propaganda, the study of public opinion and later cultural influence.
The same man appears at the center of several of these transitions.
Washburne served in the military administration, assumed a central role within the Education Subcommission, was promoted, communicated with the Public Relations Branch and subsequently directed the USIS in northern Italy while continuing to concern himself with education.
The sources currently available do not justify calling him an OSS agent.
There is no need to do so.
His documented institutional position is already unusual enough to deserve far more historical scrutiny than the traditional image of a progressive educator who simply came to Italy to improve its schools.
The School as an Instrument of Stabilization
Some of Washburne’s own statements also help us understand how the Allied administration initially regarded education.
Reopening schools had an immediate practical purpose as well: keeping children and young people off the streets, preventing disorder and helping maintain calm in rear areas while military operations continued.
Education, public order and stabilization therefore met in the same space.
The project subsequently became more ambitious.
The issue was no longer simply reopening school buildings. It concerned the formation of the citizen who would live in the new Italy.
When curricula and textbooks are changed, when personnel are selected and when the recent past is narrated differently, education inevitably ceases to be a purely technical matter.
It becomes part of political reconstruction.
The Enemy Changes, the Language Changes
The war against Fascism and Nazism ended, but only a few years later Italy found itself at the center of the emerging Cold War.
The country had one of the strongest Communist parties in Western Europe, occupied a strategic position in the Mediterranean, hosted the Vatican and lay close to the Balkans.
The struggle over Italy could therefore not be fought through elections alone.
It also passed through cinema, radio, universities, associations, publications, cultural programs and schools.
The instruments gradually changed form.
A propaganda leaflet could become a magazine; a military broadcast could become a cultural program; a message developed during wartime could be replaced by the promotion of modernization, productivity and the Western social model.
Coercion became less visible.
Influence became more sophisticated.
What Can Be Demonstrated
On terrain such as this, the distinction between documents and interpretation is essential.
Allied intervention in Italian education is documented; the Education Subcommission is documented; Washburne’s military and educational role is documented; his subsequent position in USIS is documented; OWI and PWB are documented; the presence of personnel performing intelligence functions within the occupation apparatus is documented; American policies of information and cultural influence in postwar Italy are also documented.
What we do not have is proof that Washburne was an OSS agent. We have not demonstrated that the Psychological Warfare Branch directly wrote Italian school curricula. Nor do we possess a document explicitly ordering the reduction of Italians’ critical abilities.
That distinction matters.
There is no need to invent such a document.
What we already possess deserves close examination.
A Society Educated to Be Cautious Stops Growing
The issue becomes more concrete when we look at contemporary Italy.
The latest OECD survey of adult skills is difficult to dismiss as a minor imperfection of the educational system. Thirty-five percent of Italians aged 16 to 65 perform at Level 1 or below in literacy, compared with an OECD average of 26 percent. In adaptive problem solving the figure rises to 46 percent, against an OECD average of 29 percent. Only 5 percent reach the highest levels of text comprehension, less than half the OECD average.
Perhaps the most disturbing figure concerns problem solving itself.
Almost one Italian adult in two encounters difficulty when faced with a problem involving several stages, when adapting to new information or when required to alter an initial strategy.
It is difficult to separate this result completely from an educational system that, for generations, placed heavy emphasis on rigid curricula, transmissive teaching, testing acquired knowledge and adherence to procedure rather than autonomy in finding solutions.
School is obviously not the only factor. Family, the labor market, bureaucracy, the productive structure and institutions have all contributed to shaping Italy’s economic and social character.
But the overall result is recognizable.
We have built a society in which security is frequently preferred to possibility; stable employment retains a prestige that individual initiative struggles to equal; failure is perceived less as experience than as loss; saving often assumes a defensive function before a financial one.
There are indicators pointing in the same direction.
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor records a strong fear of failure in Italy among those who perceive entrepreneurial opportunities. Around half say that fear of failure would discourage them from starting a business, one of the higher rates among comparable economies. Only around one person in ten among those not already starting or managing a business reports an intention to launch one within the following three years.
The OECD also reports a lower rate of start-up activity than in many comparable countries, especially in services.
Attributing all of this to education would be simplistic.
Pretending that seventy years spent within a particular educational model leave no trace on the way a society understands risk, authority, error and personal initiative would be equally superficial.
A school built predominantly around the correct answer implicitly teaches that making a mistake carries a cost.
A school in which the curriculum consistently precedes curiosity teaches that somebody else has already decided what needs to be known.
A strongly hierarchical school encourages people to seek validation from above.
When these behaviors are repeated for thirteen or eighteen years during a person’s formative period, it is reasonable to ask how much of that reflex survives into adulthood.
Security as a Refuge
Italy’s traditional propensity to save can also be considered within this framework, although with appropriate caution.
Saving is rational and often virtuous. Italy also has very concrete historical reasons for developing such a culture: wars, inflation, political instability, periods of limited welfare protection, the central role of the family and widespread home ownership.
Yet Italian saving has often acquired a recognizable psychological dimension.
Wealth is conceived as protection against uncertainty.
The home represents security.
Liquidity represents security.
Permanent employment represents security.
A pension represents security.
Investment, entrepreneurship and change introduce variables that are harder to control.
We do not possess evidence allowing us to trace this culture directly back to the postwar reorganization of education. The more interesting relationship is different: an educational system weak in problem solving and a society strongly averse to risk can reinforce one another across generations.
The child learns that the answer must be the one expected by the teacher.
The adult looks for the choice that minimizes uncertainty.
The parent passes that caution to the child.
The cycle begins again.
An Informed Population That Distrusts Its Own Tools
The OECD figure on adaptive problem solving acquires a significance that extends beyond the ability to read.
When almost half of the adult population displays weak skills in adapting to complex problems, the issue also concerns the ability to face novelty.
Someone with limited tools for independently assessing a situation is more likely to seek an external source that provides the interpretation.
That source may be an expert, the State, an employer, a newspaper or the majority.
This does not mean that people with low skills are automatically conformist or frightened. It means that cognitive autonomy carries a higher cost.
And this is precisely where the educational question meets the political question.
A mature system of government does not necessarily require citizens who are incapable of thinking.
A population that has learned to doubt its own ability to understand before doubting the authority offering an explanation may be enough.
The Deeper Legacy
Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the system is not found in individual school curricula that survived the Allied occupation.
It may lie in an anthropological model sedimented over time.
The citizen is educated to be correct before being autonomous; prepared for procedure rather than the unexpected; assessed according to conformity of the answer rather than the quality of the question.
Then that citizen enters a society that continually supplies new reasons to seek security.
Bureaucracy rewards conformity.
The labor market more easily protects those who are already inside.
Entrepreneurial failure may impose heavy personal costs.
Taxation and regulation can make experimentation expensive.
The family therefore becomes the final shock absorber and accumulated wealth the principal insurance policy against what cannot be predicted.
Fear of risk gradually ceases to look like fear.
It becomes caution.
Renouncing initiative becomes realism.
Dependence on decisions made by others becomes respect for expertise.
Defensive accumulation becomes financial virtue.
A society can grow so accustomed to its insecurities that it eventually stops recognizing them.
And here the circle closes.
Postwar Italy had to be stabilized, reconstructed and integrated into a new political order. Education was one of the instruments through which that transformation was accompanied. Later generations altered the system profoundly, but they did not resolve some of its structural weaknesses.
Eighty years later the results remain before us: adult skills below the OECD average, almost half the population displaying weak adaptive problem-solving abilities and an environment in which fear of failure continues to restrain entrepreneurial initiative.
The system has therefore produced an outcome, and we cannot simply rule out the possibility that, when reconstructing and reshaping a controlled democracy intended to prevent new authoritarian sparks, the new political order may have faced a trade-off between maximizing the cognitive autonomy of the liberated population and maintaining a passive form of social stability capable of lasting over time.
This remains a historical hypothesis, not an established documentary fact.
But outcomes that persist for generations deserve at least as much scrutiny as the intentions proclaimed at the beginning.
A population uncertain of its own intellectual tools tends to seek protection.
A population afraid of error tends to take fewer risks.
A population accustomed to receiving ready-made interpretative categories finds it harder to construct its own.
At that point power does not need to prohibit initiative. It is enough for initiative to appear dangerous; it does not need to outlaw dissent, because it is enough for citizens to doubt their own capacities before doubting authority.
Nor does it need to order people to preserve what they have. It is enough to construct an environment in which losing feels more frightening than attempting something new.
Ancient empires controlled territories.
Modern systems discovered something more efficient: they can influence the categories through which those territories describe themselves.
Uniforms disappear, military governments end, propaganda organizations change their names and occupation structures are dissolved.
Yet one of the oldest insights of power remains.
Whoever controls the formation of the mental categories through which a society interprets the world does not need to issue orders every day.
And all this is related to the incessant media coverage of obituaries, murders, crime stories, and chains of negativity. But this will be the subject of a future in-depth analysis.
Perhaps this is the most modern form of discipline: when the boundary within which people move is no longer perceived as a limit imposed from outside, but as the safest choice they believe they made for themselves.
FZ
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