Dicendo discitur. Assessing the educational value of declamation, from early imperial age to current times - PRIN 2022

The project focuses on one of the most influential practices devised by the Greco-Roman educational tradition, namely the production of persuasive speeches known as declamations. For nearly six centuries, the composition of these speeches was the capstone of education throughout the Roman empire. Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of declamation in shaping the cultural milieu of the ancient world; we aim at tracing the presence of this practice from antiquity to our days: we will study the training path of rhetorical exercises (progymnasmata) that was devised to teach ancient students how to master the art of persuasion; we will explore the evolution of this training through the centuries; and assess the contribution that the soft skills elicited by ancient declamation may give to our own didactic strategies. Our ultimate goal is to exploit the study of the educational tradition based on classical rhetoric in the aim of defining innovative strategies suitable to foster in students of our time the skills indispensable to the formation of reflective societies, as defined by the European Horizon programs, and to improve the quality of our democracy, which is a goal of PNR2021-27. We will investigate, first, the foundations of ancient rhetorical education, and will gather in a thematically organized database the surviving topics that provided ancient students with the tools needed for their training. We will then assess the circulation of declamation through specific moments of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, investigating the reception of techniques and commonplaces of declamation in a significant sample of the literary production of the times. We will follow the evolution of declamation through the Renaissance, assessing the production of original declamations by the Humanists and the legacy of the dialogue between ancient and modern discourses. We will then turn to the presence of declamation in the educational system laid out in the Jesuitic Ratio studiorum, so as to assess how the precepts of ancient rhetoric were incorporated in the earliest school method standardized on a global scale. Our research will yield a deeper understanding of the educational practices that for centuries shaped the European culture and will provide us with a wealth of didactic strategies suitable to be implemented in our educational system: guided discussion and debate have earned growing importance in contemporary pedagogy and several projects across Europe (but not yet in Italy) have initiated experiments based on the application of the principles of ancient rhetoric in current higher education. We will orient our research toward a direct application in high schools, as well as in academic legal programs, so as to create a link between the practices of the past and the current teaching strategies aimed at training students to voice successfully their opinions in different spheres of social life.