abuse against monolingual Sardinian-speaking children. The psychological violence consisted usually in calling the children "donkeys" and in inviting the whole class to join the mockery". Early school leaving and high school failure rates in Sardinia prompted a debate in the early Nineties on the efficaciousness of strictly monolingual education, with proposals for a focus on a comparative approach. Claims for an autonomous solution to the Sardinian economic, social and cultural problems, which the 1948 Statute proved unable to resolve, came to the fore once again in the Sixties, with campaigns, often expressed in the form of political demands by Sardinian nationalists, to give Sardinian equal status with Italian as a means to promote cultural identity. Antonio Simon Mossa had drawn from his past experiences across the world, including the newly independent country of Algeria, that Sardinians were one of the many ethnic and national minorities facing the danger of cultural assimilation, and his fervor reverberated across the Sardinian society, pushing even some non-nationalist groups to take an interest in matters relating to minorities. Although a law was passed as early as 1955 for the establishment of five professorships of Sardinian linguistics, one of the first demands for bilingualism was in fact formulated in a resolution adopted by the University of Cagliari in 1971, calling upon the national and regional authorities to recognize the Sardinians as an ethnic and linguistic minority and Sardinian as the islanders' co-official language. At a time when the Italian "modernisation plans" in Sardinia were in full swing, the Italian government was apprehensive about this deliberation by the University of Cagliari as providing the timber for further ethnic unrest in the state's peripheries. Sergio Salvi's description of the Sardinians as a "forbidden nation" in Italy further contributed to the linguistic question gaining more notoriety at the national level. A first legal draft concerning Sardinian as a language to be legally put on an equal position with Italian was developed by the Sardinian Action Party in 1975. Critical acclaim in Sardinian cultural circles followed the patriotic poem No sias isciau ("Don't be a slave") by Raimondo () Piras some months before his death in 1977, urging bilingual education to reverse the ongoing trend of cultural De-Sardization. Indeed, during the late 70s reports were released that Sardinian was on course of being abandoned in favour of Italian in the towns and among the younger generation. By then, a significant