The educational context, both formal and informal, plays a crucial role in perpetuating the violent culture that characterizes the dominant thinking, steeped in patriarchal, vindictive, individualistic, and dichotomous elements, inflicting massive suffering on living beings. The presentation focuses on the important role of educating adults in consolidating unknowingly and therefore legitimizing domination as a relational mode, maintaining rigid, asymmetrical, and unchanging patterns through spaces, times, and methods of learning. This lack of awareness perpetuates the script of domination. Often, education is understood as guiding the child toward a previous defined goal (Dolci, 1987), and consequently, adults impose their own vision without even explicitly stating it. This attitude sanctions and legitimizes the superiority and dominance of some individuals over others, perpetuating violence as an acquired pattern. The awareness of this condition is the first step toward a nonviolent educational relationship (Patfoort, 2012).

The presentation delves into the authoritarian relational modes that invade the educational system and contrasts them with the possibility of an equivalent nonviolent relationship, reporting experiences of some elementary school teachers in the Edumana school network and exposing the practices adopted following a three-year action research evaluated by the University of Milan-Bicocca. These activities include the search for the nonviolent dimension at various levels: personal, interpersonal, and social (Muller, 1980). In particular, adults are accompanied in investigating their own relational dimension, exploring the implicit violence in the daily educator/educand relationship. It is proposed to replace punishment and judgment with dialogic practices, using tools driven from some contemporary studies, such as those of Galtung, Gordon, Dolci, Patfoort, Rosenberg, Sclavi, and from sapiential cultures supporting reciprocity and interdependence among human beings (Morin, 2020). Additionally, the practice of participation is encouraged, actively involving pupils in decision-making processes and the circular communication (teachers-parents-children) promotes a welcoming and dialogic educational environment.

Adults will thus be able to offer children a daily experience intended to be a reference for the growth of citizens who can envision a possible equitable society and manage conflicts at all levels with nonviolence.

The area of study, thought and practice related to the nonviolent tradition is as little known as it is extensive and open to many possibilities for experimentation. Indeed, its inherent “experimentalism” (Gandhi, 1996) makes nonviolence lean toward an unprecedented “future to be invented” (Dolci, 1969), in the chorality of the contributions of all beings who have come to life (Capitini, 2022).

The relationship between education and nonviolence can be declined in a variety of directions (Falcicchio, 2022). Among these, the focus on social justice brings us most directly to the topic of collective nonviolent struggle and the political dimension inherent to it.

Insofar as it is “open to the thou of All”, according to the expression Aldo Capitini associates with education, as with religion or revolution (i.e., politics), nonviolent vision/practice draws an essential link with democracy, in a form that combines freedom of individuals and social justice, liberal instances with socialist instances. The combination of the two doctrines considered almost antithetical is historically owed to the philosophical-political dialogue between Aldo Capitini and Guido Calogero. They, at a very fruitful moment in the anti-fascist debate in the run-up to World War II, drafted the Manifesto of Liberal Socialism (1940) with other intellectuals-militant-activists. In the Manifesto clearly emerged a vision of democracy as a guarantee both of freedom (beginning with freedom of thought and political expression) for each individual and of equity for all: each citizen/person actively participates in the construction of community life and resources are redistributed according to the control of the citizens themselves.

The striving for social justice is not only inherent in nonviolent thought, but belongs intimately to the history of rights struggles. In them an interesting educational model has come to be consolidated (Lawson et al., 2022). It should be studied and disseminated, because it leads to collective empowerment, enabling people to fight for what is right themselves, nonviolently.

On the educational level, this perspective implies a very important "inversion," because it brings to the fore those who are "at the bottom" and overturns the usual educational logic. Moreover, it becomes necessary to recover, even for the benefit of those who adhere to pacifist and nonviolent movements, the vocabulary of struggle, the wide semantic world of fighting for a just cause. This semantic world has much in common with the sphere of meanings most often associated with war and violent conflict and, for this reason, is rejected sic et sempliciter. From the fathers and mothers of nonviolence, on the other hand, comes a clear and articulate indication regarding the energy, strength and power inherent in nonviolent action.

My abstract focuses on Aldo Capitini’s pedagogical theory of nonviolence, which finds concrete implementation in the organization of the “International seminar of discussions on non-violent techniques” (Perugia, 1963), emphasizing that his proposal does not imply the mere absence of violence; on the contrary, using the philosopher’s words “it is a mistake to believe that nonviolence is peace, order, work and peaceful sleep [...]. Nonviolence is also war, or, to put it better, a struggle, a continuous fight against the surrounding situations, the existing laws, the habits of others and their own, against their own soul and the subconscious (1).

In this regard, Capitini throughout his life tried to put the nonviolent theory into practice, through several battles fought in the first person. It is worth mentioning that for raising public awareness about conscientious objection to military service, together with Pietro Pinna (2); that for anti-militarism, summarized by the principle of “non-cooperation” with war and all its forms; that for religious freedom, against a dogmatic and self-closed Church; and again, the promotion of centers (Centri di Orientamento Sociale) in which to experience direct democracy and power from below (3).

The theoretical system of his future political campaigns is already evident in Elementi di un’esperienza religiosa (1937), where Capitini illustrates the main principles of nonviolence: firstly, the refusal to cooperate with unfair state laws, namely the “non-cooperation” principle; then, the “non-lying” and the “no-killing”, through which nonviolence is accomplished, the ultimate goal described as “an attitude of openness to existence, to freedom, to the development of all” (4). In this perspective, peace can be created not only by refusing to cooperate in war, but also day by day through education. Engaging with the thoughts of Aldo Capitini –and with the educational experiences he promoted – therefore makes it possible to arrive at the idea that education is above all an activity of acquiring knowledge as a “capacity for change".

The 1963 seminar, in which Capitini invites to reflect on the non-violent method and its techniques, saw the participation of several nonviolence theorists and activists, also international, including Danilo Dolci and Peter Cadogan (5). It anticipated some topics of '68 that are still very topical today: civil disobedience, democratic participation in political life, respect for the animal world, persuasion for peace and nonviolent education in schools (6). Following the success of the Seminar, the Nonviolent Movement was formed to which Capitini decided to devote himself entirely, supported by his lifelong friend Pietro Pinna.

Emotional and relational literacy is declining.

Competition and violence as frames of conflict management

(interpersonal, intergroup and international) emerge in their

hegemonic power, both in the cultural and political fields.

Active non-violence, which goes beyond the illusion of generic

pacifism, is scarcely practised, both in the social and

educational and training spheres.

Authoritarian dynamics and habits, violent practices often unaware of themselves, competitive and anti-cooperative models continue to emerge in educational institutions.

Conflict is still all too often managed in paternalistic and maternalistic forms, in an alternation of caring and aggressive modes, harbingers of fear, passivity, disengagement.

Virtualisation and digitalisation are completing the negative picture described so far: real communication and conversational deficiencies are developing, especially in public and especially among adolescents and young people.

Scholastic and educational institutions are therefore today at a crossroads: choose to propose a non-violent alternative to this drift or collusively accept the irreversibility of these processes and join the chorus.

A conflict, in fact, seems to be open today between those who -in our spheres- work for an interactivity aimed at increasing productivity and efficiency with respect to tasks, and those who insist on seeking paths that have relationships, emotions and learning that are not purely notional or directed towards a merely technical purpose at their centre.

The workshop wants to pay attention to these processes and ask what suggestions and guidelines non-violence can propose today.

Finally, the workshop aims to explore -through games and after-games-

some of these dynamics, with the hope of stimulating a

perspective in reflection, learning and collective action.