Erasmus is a recent achievement (1987): the educationalist Sofia Corradi fought for the recognition of exams taken abroad.
If for more than 35 years millions of students have been able to decide to study in other European universities it is also thanks to the battle of the pedagogist Sofia Corradi who developed the Erasmus programone of the greatest successes of the European Union.
Erasmus mother. From the 1987 exams taken at various European universities are always recognized (provided you pass them, of course). Today it seems almost obvious for those thousands of students who join the Erasmus project, however it is a rather recent achievement.
The credit goes to Sofia Corradi, an Italian pedagogist born in 1934: enrolled in the Faculty of Law at the La Sapienza University of Rome, she had not been recognized for some exams and a master’s degree taken in the USA.
The battle. In 1969 he proposed to the Ministry of Education the first draft of what would become the Erasmus project, whose name was inspired by a globetrotting scholar like Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466/69-1536).
Corradi had to face 19 years of bureaucratic delays and prejudices that are difficult to shake. But, in the end, the mobility and cultural exchange program between universities saw the light and was definitively implemented.
The pioneers. But if the Erasmus project is a recent achievement, the custom among European students of traveling from one university to another began as early as the Middle Ages, as the article “The pioneers of Erasmus” which you find in the issue of Evidence Network History on newsstands.
