Il dibattito sull’istruzione agraria femminile all’inizio del Novecento e la sperimentazione di Aurelia Josz

The paper intends to analyze the debate on vocational agricultural education for girls that developed at the beginning of the 20th century and the original contribution made on this topic by the pedagogist and educator Aurelia Josz, founder of the Scuola Pratica Agricola Femminile (Practical Agricultural School for Women) in Milan. Concerning the search for female educational channels as an alternative to the Scuola Normale, in the first decades of the 20th century in Europe there was a partial diffusion of agricultural schools, experiments aimed at offering girls a good level of professional preparation for employment in the countryside. Aurelia Josz drew inspiration from these experiments in the realization of the Scuola Pratica Agraria Femminile (Practical Agricultural School for Women), a didactic and educational experiment that for the first time in our country aimed to spread a good level of education among girls destined for professional insertion in the countryside. The contribution is based on the results of research still in progress, conducted on some articles published in the magazine La Coltura Popolare and on documents in the Archives of the Società Umanitaria in Milan, at the Laboratory for Historical-Educational Research, Documentation, Preservation and Digitisation of SUPSI, and the Jewish Documentation Centre in Milan.