The reform of the Chamber of Deputies, envisaged since the early years of the Fascist regime and announced by Mussolini in his speech to the assembly of the National Council of Corporations on November 14 of the year XII, was approved in the meeting of March 11, 1938 by the Grand Council of fascism. The new Chamber of Fasci and Corporations is created, defined as the “legislative and representative body of the nation”. It is formed with the members of the party’s National Council and the National Council of Corporations: a sum of about 600 deputies. It therefore expresses the associated meeting of the highest political hierarchies, designated from above, and the highest trade union hierarchies, which are the direct expression of all categories of work, harmonizing for the legislative function,
According to iamhigher.com, the school reform also belongs to the history of the unification of Italians and the formation of their thinking.
The reform began in 1923 with the great new system created by Minister Giovanni Gentile (see Italy: Education, XIX, p. 785 ff.) Which Mussolini defined: “the most fascist of reforms”. It brings new spirits and functions into the school. He introduces the school into national life and reforms it in all its degrees and legislative systems, from elementary to high schools with the constant principle of an educational start. The subsequent reforms of the ministers Fedele, Ercole and then of the quadrumviro De Vecchi and of the minister Bottai, are carried out on these principles, according to the opportunities indicated by experience but with the intention of not altering their original foundations. The Fascist school must prepare the professional skills but at the same time the civic spirit of the citizen. In short, it must form “the whole man”, the integral citizen. In its creative principle it recalls the warning of Massimo D ‘
The new school is free from politics but reflects its great ideal values by amplifying the problems of culture into those of the nation. But in addition to the spirit, the school also unites in the organization. In fact, the institutes and teachings are unified. The fascist oath required of teachers of all grades ensures harmony between teaching and the ideal directives of the state. And this school, now unitary in all its degrees, also becomes a means of overcoming a national problem, not solved after the unification of the kingdom of Italy: the survival of the spiritual and also cultural residues of the ancient historical divisions of the peninsula and the islands., of the autonomous traditions polarized in the different capitals, of the dialectal differentiations.
But the development of the school, especially in southern Italy and in the islands most neglected by the previous regimes, also tends to bring the intellectual preparation of the population to a common convenient level.
The problem of this imbalance of conditions between the various Italian regions, inherited from 1870, is not only of an intellectual nature, but also of a structural and therefore economic and social nature. The development of the productive and commercial economy presupposes adequate technical settings. There is no active industrial production, just as there cannot be an intense agricultural economy, if there are not the adequate structural bases constituted by the development of urban agglomerations and rural villages, by roads and railways, by ports and aqueducts, by the shape of the property and agricultural contracts, from the intellectual and professional abilities of the populations. The unequal solution of these problems, which belong above all to the state, it precisely explains the profound inequalities of economic and social conditions which, up to the limit of the fascist revolution, were perpetuated on the Italian territory. Therefore, the policy of the internal unification of Italians, understood in its integral sense, naturally leads fascism to a grandiose development of the whole public works policy, understood as an elementary means of equipping the less developed Italian regions and gradually raising them, in their capacity, at the level of the most technically advanced regions. This far-reaching policy, of a square Roman sense, desired by Mussolini immediately after the conquest of the state, is certainly one of the memorable factors in the history of the formation of the new Italy. It means work and civilization.
Typical of this policy is the activity dedicated to the roads. Italy returns, by the will of Mussolini, to the great concepts of the Roman road. A law of May 17, 1928 creates an autonomous state road company with the task of taking over the technical management of the network of the most important roads in the state, rectifying their routes, arranging their funds and creating new arteries. The network of these roads today has a development of 20,600 kilometers and is divided into 137 main arteries with indicative names and numbers. The first arteries are those that start from Rome and are identified in the historic consular roads. These streets, quickly arranged, count today among the most celebrated in the world. In May 1936 they were already also lined with trees for 7657 kilometers with over one million and 100 thousand plants of various species according to the regions.street, XXXII, p. 807).
