Giovanni Gentile

Minister of Public Education, 1922–1924

In 1922, on the recommendation of Benedetto Croce, who had refused the role himself, Gentile was named Minister for Public Education for the government of Benito Mussolini. The cabinet, though strongly right-wing, was broadly non-partisan; Gentile's inclusion, alongside several other notable non-fascists, was taken as a sign of reconciliation and the promised return to law-and-order. He officially joined the National Fascist Party in 1923.

In his capacity as Minister for Public Education, he instituted the 1923 Gentile Reform, which was the first major reform of the education system since the Unification of Italy and the Casati Law Despite lacking any substantial education policy prior to coming to power, it was the first significant piece of legislation of the Fascist regime; Mussolini described it as the "most Fascist reform".

Based on philosophically idealist and conservative elitist ideas, it was designed to help form the new elite of Fascist society and to reduce the number of intellectual graduates saturating the job market.

An additional purpose of the reform was to improve the regime's relationship with the Catholic Church. It made religious instruction mandatory in junior schools, gave equal distinction to private (notably Catholic) and state schools, and allowed both to sit the same qualification exams for entrance into higher education; these were important elements of the programme of the Catholic Popular party, and did much to shore up Catholic opinion of the Fascist regime—a long-standing problem for Italian governments due to the Roman Question—as part of a wider programme of concessions by Mussolini to the Vatican. However, it did not go far enough to completely please the Church. Complaints remained over the fact that religious teaching was neither given by priests nor extended beyond the junior schools.

Included in this reform was an attempt to limit the number of women teachers in schools, part of Italian Fascism's wider campaign against feminism, suggesting that: Women do not have, nor will they ever have, either the moral or mental vigor to teach in those schools which formed the ruling class of the country.

The reform also mandated that Italian was the only language to be used in public schools, severely impacting the autonomy of non-Italian speaking minorities—known as allogeni—particularly in the regions of Alto-Adige and the Julian March, recently annexed in the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye following the First World War.

Under Gentile's reform, the secondary school system was substantially reorganised. The technical schools (scuola technica), relied on by the middle class for educational attainment and in which pupil numbers had increased rapidly since 1900, were abolished. In their place were "complementary schools" (scuola complementare), general education schools which did not allow access to universities or further qualifications. Entry into particular fields, such as science and engineering, were restricted to other specialised secondary schools. The curriculum was also rearranged, emphasising the humanities and especially philosophy; teaching of Latin was also more widely introduced.

Pupil numbers were successfully reduced under Gentile's new system. Secondary school student numbers dropped from 337,000 to 237,000 between 1923 and 1926–27, and university students by 13,000, from 53,000 in 1919–20 to 40,000 in 1928–29. Enrollment in the technical schools, and the complementary schools that replaced them, dropped by half from 1922–23 to 1923–24.

The reform, which had produced a system far more complicated than before, proved unpopular. After Gentile left his position in 1924, it would be gradually dismantled by his successors; the "complementary schools" were abolished in 1930, and in 1939 then-Minister for Education Giuseppe Bottai made further sweeping changes to the education system.

He resigned his position in 1924 during the Matteotti Crisis. Christopher Seton-Watson suggested it was in protest of the murder of Giacomo Matteotti; Gabriele Turi disputes this, writing instead that the purpose of his resignation was to reinforce the Fascist regime and relieve Mussolini's cabinet of his own unpopular presence.