Teaching of mathematics in educational journals of Turin (1849-1894)

Since the first half of the 19th century, the most renowned intellectuals in the Savoyard Kingdom put effort into facing up the backwardness of the educational system and in particular into enhancing technical-scientific studies. Educational journals were one of the ways to achieve these aims (Chiosso, 2013). From 1849 to 1894 in Piedmont the Società d’Istruzione e di Educazione, a Turinese association of politicians, professors and teachers, which represented a unique case in all of Italy, published the first successful educational journals of the country. Since the first periodicals dedicated solely to the teaching of mathematics flourished just in the 1870s, our purpose is to investigate the role of the teaching of mathematics in the journals of this association, by showing the knowledge and working habits between primary, technical and secondary schools. We examine how Savoyard Kingdom stood out for its educational journals, which were free from the censorship contrary to other Italian territories and which payed attention towards the elementary and secondary scientific teaching. We also analyse the situation after the Italian Unification, when a conspicuous number of ‘practical educational journals’ for elementary schools, which provided weekly articles about the teaching of mathematics, were published in Turin. This situation changed when in the 1880s the mathematical journals for teaching blossomed.