Forced italianisation and ethnic hierarchisation: the use of technical education in the territories annexed after 1918

Abstract

Italy found itself, following the end of the First World War, having to manage the schools in the annexed provinces of Trentino and South Tyrol and the Julian provinces, a task complicated by the fact that schools teaching in languages other than Italian had previously existed in these areas. This article aims to analyse how the new state dealt with these schools within the context of the intense process of attempted Italianisation of these areas, and in particular the relationship with technical schools. The main focus of the article is the territory of the Istrian-Julian regions, without neglecting certain insights derived from the situation in the German and Ladin-speaking areas of South Tyrol. The article focuses on the developments at the Tolmin school, where a transition took place from a Slovenian-language teacher-training college to a Slovenian grammar school, culminating in the debate over its closure and the establishment of an agricultural and forestry school. The closure of the teacher-training college was motivated by the desire to eliminate the training of a Slovenian teaching class. The theme that emerges is a general reliance on technical education – in cases where it survived and was directed at non-Italian populations – with the aim of Italianising them, whilst keeping them in a working condition considered inferior and through concrete measures to reduce Croatian and Slovenian classical and teacher-training schools, preferring technical schools or, at a pinch high schools, but of a more national character compared to ethnic institutions considered, even before the advent of the Fascist regime, to be foreign and used by the Austro-Hungarian Empire against the Italians of the areas in question.